My First Baby Quilt

I was able to give my first baby quilt project to it’s lucky recipient the other day! (The other day was a year ago!) Little Johnathan will hopefully enjoy playing on it and cuddling with it for years to come!

When I found out that one of our board game group was expecting a baby I was thrilled for a chance to make a quilt for them! Baby quilts are great, fast finishes, don’t take a crazy amount of fabric, and are a perfect size to fit in my little Brother machine. I might make a few more to play with some techniques and patterns, but I need more friends to have babies! (I’ve since decided it’s fine to build up a stack of baby quilts in my closet waiting for recipients!) 

I was in one of my local fabric stores, Mandors Fabric, and saw the Lewis and Irene bear collection and thought it went so nicely together! I wanted to do something simple and just did equilateral triangles of the different fabrics.

With four fabrics it was took a little playing with the layout to get one that didn’t have too many repeats in the same area. Quilters will be the first to tell you that random is really hard!! The edges threw me as I didn’t think through the direction of the prints and the directions of the half triangles I needed to make the quilt square, but a few extra bits cut at the end worked fine!

I machine quilted along the big triangles, and since my wool/cotton batting needed stitched up to 4″ apart I added some hand quilting lines vertically down the middle of the triangles to add some texture.

My mom suggested Susie’s Magic Binding (this is the tutorial I used) since it’s all done on machine and a little sturdier for a baby quilt! It was a great binding to do, and I definitely recommend it if you like the little flange look! Very nice finish and super easy! Here’s a close up of the binding once on the quilt:

With the leftover fabric I managed to put together a fabric box using a modified version of this tutorial  which was a great way of gifting the quilt and gave the new parents something to put in the baby’s room that matches the quilt! I figure it would be good for clothes, or diapers, or toys, anything really! You can see it in the top photo of the quilt.

Hope the family loves it and when the baby’s a little bigger I’ll have to get a photo of him with it for my archives!