Baby Quilt - Part One...

As many of you know, I have done very little quilting, and even less blogging about it over the past two years, because I have been pursuing a Master's Degree.

My degree is a Master of Ministry Degree, and I am not sure exactly what God has planned for me, but I do know that since I no longer have papers to write and hundreds of pages to read every week, I now have time to get back to my sewing machines.

A little over a month ago, a friend of ours had a baby, and my first project back at my machine was a quilt for them.  I waited until it was delivered to publish two posts I wrote about the baby quilt process...  Here is the first...

I almost feel like a newbie again and I made some newbie mistakes including forgetting to take as many photos as I should to make for a good post, but here it goes, I'll share what I can...

I started by asking the baby's Grandma what the colors were in the Baby's nursery.  (I wanted it to be a surprise after all!)  It turns out that Grandma had re-covered a rocking chair for the nursery and had all of her scrap material still at home.  So I got my hands on that scrap material and chose a pattern that would enable me to use as much of the scrap as possible.

Fabric from Grandma

Purples and grays.  I love working with grays! Lucky Me!

Purples and Grays, all ready to be cut up...

I wanted to be able to finish this quilt quickly, as the baby was born the week I got started, so I chose a fairly simple "Stacked Coins" pattern which I adapted slightly to make cutting and assembly go a little more quickly.

I cut the FQs into 4.5 x 2.5 inch rectangles and 4.5 x 4.5 inch squares.  I had some prints and some batiks.  I put a print square next to a batik rectangle for half of the blocks and a batik square next to a print rectangle for the other half of the blocks, and started chain sewing...

Rectangles and Square paired and ready for sewing...

Chain Sewing.  I chain sewed 80 pieces.

After matching the colors, and creating the sub-unit blocks, I paired each subunit with another unit and then added a gray border to one side of the block.

Three Full Blocks with two squares, two rectangles, a border piece
being prepped for sewing together

Here you can see my lettering & numbering system.  I had just pulled that number out from the seam, as it was going to be replaced with a new one.





I will post more assembly photos and the finished product later this week!


Until His work in me is Complete,
Paul