Baby Quilt

I made a baby quilt for a friend, and thought I'd share it with you, and a little how-to.

Fabric

I found some soft grey floral fabric

Some more colourful grey floral

And... Bambi! I thought this white outline of Bambi on a grey background was rather sweet, but too overly Disney-fied.

Putting it together

I wanted to make a 1 meter square quilt, so bought a meter of the grey floral fabric, and had a fat quarter of the Bambi fabric and the pink/ yellow grey fabric. This made the decision to do a patchwork on the other side. I had a few other bits of fabric to fill in the black spaces, so laid it out on the floor and played about a bit until I had a more concrete idea of the design.

After getting the lay out sorted, I started ironing all the pieces and pinning them in place before sewing them together.

I sewed the pieces together in sections, then ironed the section flat before pinning and sewing to the next piece, ironing the joined section then pinning to the next section, sewing, ironing again...

The individual pieces joined together.

Below you can see how the patchwork side looked when sewn together, and being pinned in place with the quilt wadding the backing.

Quilting

One of the tricky things about sewing the quilt together it that you really should start sewing from the center and working outwards, so you have to roll half the quilt up to fit it through the sewing machine.

I sewed the layers of the quilt together along the lines of the patchwork.

Seeing the quilting on the plain side of fabric.

Binding

I might have gotten the binding... wrong. It's there, essentially it does the job of sealing the edges of the quilt, but it ain't great. It should be neater. I've made quilts before, but it's been a while and I'd forgotten how to do it properly. I really should have researched it again before going ahead. Ah well.

I did each binding edge separately, rather than as one long piece, to be joined in the middle of a side. My way, you see stitching at every corner. It's messy looking, but I've learnt from that mistake; hopefully you'll learn from my mistake too.

In order to do a proper job, might I suggest ignoring my horrible mistake, and take advice from this Youtube video by MadeByMarzipan?

I thought I had a photo of the totally finished. Unfortunately, I seem to have missed it; so here's an almost finished quilt, before the last two edges of binding went on.

A little baby girl has now been born, and mum and baby are doing well. I'll have to wait to see if the quilt goes down ok :)

Thanks for having a look, and hope you enjoyed it!