One Block Baby Quilt Completed: Birds Roosting

My One Block Baby Quilt, “Birds Roosting” is all done. It was lots of fun to quilt. Here are some of the details.

• There is scalloped quilting under the birds so it looks like they are sitting on a nest…or a hammock!

• There are uneven scalloping “feathers” in the orange blocks around the central focal square.

• There are free motion quilted bird nests in each of the hot pink cornerstone squares.

• Tracking around the turquoise leafy triangles in a stitch built into my Bernina that always reminds me of bird tracks!

I wasn’t sure i could stitch out the four nests but drew a quick diagram and realized that it was totally doable…not that different from the free motion flowers I stitch often! All four nests are a little different…but then they would be in real life!

The backing in an airy leafy fabric I had in my stash from last summer which is just perfect!

I don’t know if the baby is a girl or a boy. With all the colors, I think the quilt is really gender neutral, but I put on a blue binding to balance off those hot pink cornerstone blocks and the light pink triangles at the edge of the quilt.!

For more information about this quilt and the focus fabric “Roosting Place” see my post from June 9, 2022.

I’m super happy with how this quilt came out!

"Hello!" Strip Baby Quilt

I’ve been waiting for just the right baby for this Moda© fabric named “Corner of 5th and Fun” designed by Sandy Gervais. It’s not a current fabric, but there is still some of the fabric line available if you look. I had a border print and two coordinating fabrics in my stash, but only used two of the fabrics in this quilt.

I cut the border print into strips, taking out some of the sky between them. That gave me 3 inch wide strips of slightly cream background fabric I could use in the quilt.

That 3 inch strip of background determined the size of my pinwheel blocks. I used a variety of color- coordinating scraps in my stash to create the 14 little three inch finished pinwheels blocks.

This is a strip quilt, created with 7 sections—two borders, 3 panels pieces and two sets of pinwheels.

I mixed quilting techniques, using my walking foot on most of the sections and free motion quilting on the three panel sections. I liked the kites in the long-arm quilting design what was used on my “Post-Cuts” quilt, so decided to put kites in the free motion quilting in the sky of the village panels. I practiced the kites drawing them by hand first and then looked at the professional long-arm kites. My kites were stitched slightly differently and that’s what I stuck with. My theory is that is always best to stitch free motion designs you can draw rather than try to copy someone else’s! Everyone’s motor skills are different and you need to go with what you body can do.

Here is one of my kites.

My doodled free motion kite design

The backing can out of my stash of mushroom fabrics. It was printed 10 years ago. I think that makes it a modern vintage fabric! I love the stripes on the stems of these mushrooms, and that the back picks up the idea of mushrooms seen in the border print.

Vintage mushroom fabric backing

This new baby is part of an extended family which has still has baby quilts I made over 40 years ago! Hopefully the new generation will enjoy their quilts just as long!

Quilt Panel, my new Spoonflower design

Here's one of the new designs in my Spoonflower.com shop.  This is a quilt panel with my Storybook Houses design and a 3 inch wide border. It's not a cheater quilt because there aren't any printed stitch lines, but it is an easy quilt that could be completed in an afternoon if you suddenly need a baby present!

I quilted the quilt above with all straight line stitches and the wavy Bernina stitch #4. You don't looks need any fancy quilting skills to make this quilt look great!  However, if you have free motion quilting skills, it would also be lots of fun to stitch shingles, stones and siding designs on the houses!

There is coordinating fabric with an all-over house design with slight smaller houses that makes a great backing. I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding using pieces and pieces left over from binding other quilts. I love the look and I love using up the leftovers!

Because the quilt panel is just 35 inches wide and the fabric is 43 inches wide, there are 5 1/2 inches of extra yellow border color printed 1 yard of panel fabric.  This extra yellow fabric is just long enough so it could be cut at 2 1/2 x 35 inches for use as horizontal sashing between the rows of houses. That would make a quilt that is slightly rectangular rather than square a bit larger.

I made this quilt using the Ultra Kona® Cotton option available at Spoonflower.com. The Ultra Kona® is a fairly recent upgrade and it takes the dyes much better than the Kona® previously available.

This design was fun to draw and it was lots of fun to quilt. Hope you like it!!

Charm Square Baby Quilt with Dogs and Bright Colors, "Dogs + Sunshine"

A fellow Boston Modern Guild member gave me this "Dog Park" fabric designed by Sarah Frederking for Studio E fabrics. She said as soon as she saw it, she thought of me!  How great is that!!

Another friend, who also loves dogs, is having a baby soon.  They don't know if it's a boy or a girl so for her baby quilt needs to be gender neutral.  As soon as I saw this dog fabric, I knew they'd love it!

I cut the charm squares (5 x 5 inches patches) to match the colors in the doggie feature fabric. The patches of "Dog Park" fabric are in diagonal pairs, randomly placed in the quilt top.  I love how bright and cheerful this quilt is!

The quilting is stitch-in-the-ditch with a walking foot across the entire grid of blocks. Then I added 3 sections of diagonal stitching and two more sections of vertical stitching running between the top and middle diagonals. The added quilting gives this simple quilt an interesting texture, more visible in the photos since it's already be washed.

I used the "Dog Park" fabric for the backing of the quilt.  This makes it a fun, reversible baby quilt!

The back of "Dogs + Sunshine" showing the "Dog Park" fabric

I can't wait to see what my friend thinks of this quilt I made for her baby!

Busy Beach Town Quilt Completed

All done!  The "Busy Beach Town" quilt is finished!  I used a blue/green/lavender variegated thread for a free motion loops-and-stars quilting pattern.  And I incorporated a couple scraps from the quilt into the solid grey binding.

It's a two sided quilt.  Here's the back--a licensed fabric panel (C) 2015 Hasbro (TM) for Quilting Treasures ® 

Back of the quilt

The front of this quilt will be good for floor time when the baby is an infant, and play time when he's old enough to have a garage full of toy cars and trucks!  Fun times!

Busy Beach Town Quilt Top

This is my "Busy Beach Town" baby quilt top, ready to be quilted.  It's small, a good size for using for floor time for a baby or for a toddler to drag around.

The Four Square patches create red chains in one direction, a safety green in the other. There are also 2 blue chains that blend in with the bigger blocks and aren't really evident.

It is a busy beach town!  Child's delight--rail crossings, construction trucks, fire engines, ambulances, Dalmations!  Maybe NOT an adult's idea of quiet vacation, but if you look carefully, you'll see some river rafting and a coupe sailboats in the large blue blocks, and of course the lighthouses!  So a little something to make everyone happy on an August afternoon in a beach town!

Busy Beach Town Quilt: Planning

I saw one of my neighbors while walking the dogs this past week. They are expecting a baby this fall and I asked when the new little one is due--soon!  I thought I had til October!  Time to make to baby quilt!

I know the baby is a boy so I was planning a Fireman Quilt. But when I looked through my stash of novelty fabrics I realized the blue background of the lighthouse fabric was a great match for the blue in the emergency vehicle fabric.  And I liked the tossed trucks in blue and green.  It is August--I must be thinking about vacations! At any rate, the quilt morphed into a Busy Beach Town quilt! 

With four patch blocks making a simple chain and larger blocks with the feature fabrics, this is going to be a fun, and fast, quilt to make!

Baby Quilt in a Weekend #2: "Giraffe Party!"

Happy New Year's!  Here's a baby quilt pattern to welcome in 2015. 

We've all had this happen...we need a baby quilt and we need it yesterday!   Here is the 2nd in a series of Baby Quilts in a Weekend.  With a bit of diligence, this quilt can be completed in just 2 days.  The dishes may not get washed but the quilt will be finished and ready to wrap! 

I've had this the giraffe fabric in my stash for several years.  I found it on a excursion to Keepsake Quilting, long before grey had become a hot color for baby's rooms.  The fabric was so unique.  I knew that it would make a cute baby quilt for the right family some day. 

Because there are giraffes in the focus fabric, I wanted everything about the quilt to be T-A-L-L!  The blocks are tall and the quilting design is vertical.

The quilt blocks are simple rectangles with a 2 1/2 inch strip of Kona cotton used as an accent color.

Block of the focus fabric with the strip of accent fabric, ready for sewing

The colored strips are on opposite sides of the focus fabric in each horizontal row.  Row 1 has the strips on the right, Row 2 has them on the left.  There are 5 rows in the quilt, so there are an uneven number of right and left blocks.

The mother of the baby receiving this quilt loves celebrations. I had some fabric with tiny peach and grey pennants which matched the focus fabric. I added to to the top of one block in each row of the quilt.  They are the reason why this quilt is named "Giraffe Party"!    
 

While I love the strips with the pennants on individual blocks, and while I really did want them in this quilt, I won't use them when I make this pattern again.  I think the white strips running down the quilt in a stair-step pattern detracts from the verticality of the quilt's design.  I think the quilt is a lot more interesting in use than it is hanging up for a photograph.

Giraffe Party!  40 x 50 inches

I did part of the quilting with my walking foot and part by free motion quilting. All the quilting is vertical, running from top to bottom of the quilt. 

My cat, Chester, had had surgery the week I was working on this quilt. He came to sit beside me on my chair while I was doing the quilting. It's always a tight fit when he does this, but even tighter due to the Elizabethan Collar he was wearing. (The collar kept him from reaching, and removing the stitches at the surgical site).   At one point he must have leaned forward bumped one of the stitch choice buttons on the front of my machine.  I was quite surprised when I reached the end of my row and realized that Chester had made a design change (a hemming stitch) without my permission!  I got a good chuckle about his creativity and then did a bit of un-sewing!

The basic quilting is straight lines with varying numbers of parallel lines and varying distance between some of the adjacent lines.  I chose to do a vine and leaf free motion design through the center of the blocks of focus fabric, seen in the photo at the top of this post. When you flip the quilt over to the back, it looks like a whole cloth quilt design. It's really beautiful, making this quilt truly reversible. 

Quilting on the back of the quilt

To make this quilt:

Yardage:

• Focus fabric: 1 1/2 yards
• Assorted solid color strips: 25 strips 2 1/2 inches x 10 1/2 inches (3/4 yard if the solid color strips are to be all the same color)
• Binding:  1/2 yard
• Backing: 1 3/4 yards
• 1 crib size quilt batting  45 x 60 inches

Instructions:

1. Cut 25 blocks 6 1/2 inches wide x 10 1/2 inches long from the focus fabric
2. Sew a 2 1/2 inch x 10 1/2 inch strip of the solid color fabric to the RIGHT side of 15 of the focus fabric rectangles
3. Sew a 2 1/2 inch x 10 1/2 inch strip of the solid color fabrics to the LEFT side of the remaining 10 focus fabric rectangles.
4. Sew the quilt together in horizontal rows--5 blocks to each row, starting with blocks with the colored strip on the RIGHT side of the block.  In row 2 the colored strips will be on the LEFT side of the block.
5. Sew the 5 completed rows together to finish the quilt top.
6. Sandwich the quilt top, quilt batting and backing fabric and quilt as desired. 
7. Cut 5  strips of the binding fabric,  2 1/2 inches x Width of fabric (40 inches).  Sew strips together to make the binding. Fold the binding in half across the 2 1/2 width and press.  Attach binding to your quilt. 
8. Add a label!  You're done!