a quilt for Reece

I spent an awesome weekend with my cousins and their precious baby girl. And since this quilt has been happily installed in her nursery, I can now share! I took loads more pictures, but most of them didn't turn out very well. (Plus, I had some major uh-oh's along the way!) But anyways…here is my first ever baby quilt, made with Hello Sunshine.

I had the (at the time) mom-to-be pick out a fabric collection she liked, but didn't tell her what it was for. Once decided, I ordered a charm pack and yardage for the backing and bias tape. This was my first order with the Fat Quarter Shop and I have to say, I was sincerely impressed. The fabric was fantastic quality, everything was cut and packaged perfectly, and shipping…I mean, I felt like I clicked "finalize order", blinked, and it was on my doorstep. No compensation or anything, but I think they're great!

First, I cut all the charm pack pieces (5") down to 3.5" so I could use the extra strips to make a border. I didn't use a pattern or anything, but I'll probably try to tackle that on my next project. For this, I knew I wanted pinwheels and to keep the rest simple. So I pulled out a couple of the pieces that I didn't love, paired the rest up, and made a bunch of pinwheel blocks. I planned on showing a tutorial for that but it didn't work out (keep an eye out for one soon maybe). Then I took all the pinwheels and arranged them on the floor:

Then I added white sashing out of the same white in the pinwheels (yardage from Hobby Lobby). I wanted to add something special so instead of continuing the pinwheels over the whole top, I left a two-block space for an applique block. I won't tell you how I attached it, because naturally I didn't decide to do this till the end and it was a mess to add. To made the applique, I used leftovers from the charm pack. For the petals, I sewed strip pieces of complimentary fabric and cut out the petals at odd angles. I used steam transfer paper to adhere them to the white. I also sewed long strips of the charm pack leftovers to use as a strip piece border and attached it to the sashing.

Add another white border bit, add lots of fluffy batting and a backing fabric, safety pin it all together, and spend a few hours hand quilting the whole thing together. (It was tricky since I didn't use a frame and I did two layers of batting to make it super soft.) Then I trimmed it all up, made the bias tape, and sewed that on to finish things off. This was my first time making bias tape and I have definitely got to find an easier way to bind – not sure why but this is 100% the hardest part for me. Ugh!

Final quilt - Yay!! It's finished!

But it's done and you're happy and you know they will love it. At the last minute, I also decided to embroider Reece's initials into the corner so I did that with some floss from Hobby Lobby. Here's a close up:

And if you were wondering, the backing is Hello Sunshine Multi Dot, and the (somewhat sloppy) bias tape was made from Hello Sunshine Multi Bias Stripe.

I know my method is still pretty crazy and it definitely wasn't perfect, but the parents were happy and it was a fun project. And easily done over my week off for Christmas.