Adventures In Baby Quilts
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A friend of mine will be having her second child in the not-too-distant future. For her first, I crocheted her a baby blanket in white and pastel yarn in my favorite blanket pattern. For her second, I thought I’d try a quilt. I didn’t realize this until I started getting interested in quilting, but the companies that specialize in quilting cotton fabric sometimes make fabric panels…that is, a larger piece of fabric that has a picture or pattern on it, and is meant to be used in one piece, instead of being cut up and pieced back together like usual.
My usual store for quilting cotton let me down in this regard…JoAnn’s panel selection is sub-par. However, Craft Warehouse has a nice selection, and I ended up purchasing their National Parks panel, which was 36” x 43”, an excellent size for a baby’s quilt. I also bought a lovely reddish brown batik print fabric for the backing and the binding, and enough fusible fleece to get the job done.
In an effort to reduce the amount of movement the two fabrics would have as I attempted to quilt them together with the fleece between, I ended up fusing a piece of fleece to the back of each piece, hoping to stabilize both fabrics enough that they wouldn’t stretch out when I did my quilting seams on it.
Then I placed the batik backing and the printed panel with wrong sides (now, the fleece sides) facing each other, and used my quilting pins to pin them together securely. I used a LOT of pins. Next, I used my erasable fabric markers and a yardstick to draw vertical lines on the panel, spaced as far apart as the width of the yardstick.
Next, I put the walking foot on my sewing machine and started sewing down each of the quilting lines I’d marked. I started in the center and started to work to the right first. It took a few seams, but I realized that despite the fusible fleece backing both fabrics, both fabrics were stretching a little. But…only a little. I think I might have gotten around this had I alternated the direction I was sewing the seams, but I sewed all of them top to bottom. Once I realized what was happening, I also realized that I would have to keep sewing from top to bottom as I worked on the left side of the quilt, or else I’d get a bit of a rhomboid shape. I rolled up the part of the quilt I wasn’t actively sewing on (so that it would fit through the aperture on my machine) and used quilting pins to hold the roll in place. Honestly, the distortion isn’t bad and would in fact be completely invisible if it weren’t for the fact that there is a square (well, it used to be square) edging printed round the outside of the panel pattern. This does show the slight distortion but I decided to live with it.
After that, I used my transparent ruler, my rotary cutter, and my cutting mat to trim the edges of all the fabric and fleece so there was an even border around the panel’s design.
And finally, the binding. I again followed the instructions from this fabulous YouTube video. Had I bothered to review my own notes from the first quilt I made, I’d have known to cut my binding strips 2.5” wide. But I did not check and I did not remember, and therefore I cut my strips at 2” wide. This was not quite wide enough, as it turned out, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
First step was to cut my strips, and then attach them to each other along the bias so that I had a continuous LONG strip of binding. The easiest way to sew that bias seam is to overlap the ends a little, rather than lining them up precisely. This may seem counterintuitive, but I assure you that when you start sewing, the overlap gives you a very visible starting and ending point, which is an advantage. I trimmed the seam to 1/4” and trimmed off the little dog ears before pressing open all the seams.
Once I had my long continuous binding strip, I pressed it in half and then started attaching the raw edge of the binding to the raw edge of my quilt on the back side, using a 1/4” seam. I left the first 10” unsewn so that I could easily join the ends later.
When I got to my corners, I marked 1/4” away from the new edge, and stopped sewing at the 1/4” mark. Then I pivoted the fabric, and sewed toward the corner at a 45º angle, and cut my thread. Then the folding of the fabric for the mitered corner: first fold the binding away along the angle I’d just sewed, and then fold it down so that the new fold is parallel to the top edge. If that doesn’t make sense, have a look at that YouTube video I linked above…the lady explains the whole process quite well.
I stopped sewing the binding about 10” before I reached the end, in order to give myself room to join the end with the beginning. Again, refer to the YouTube video and watch her explain it, but essentially, I folded back both ends of the binding so that there was a little space between them (maybe 1/8”?) rather than having them meet. Then I pressed in that fold with my iron so that the fabric would show the marks. It’s quite difficult to see on this dark fabric, but I ended up with a little X in the middle of both pieces of binding, which I highlighted with white erasable marker to make them more visible in the pictures. I laid the ends over one another in the approved fashion (I reviewed the video first to make sure I didn’t screw it up this time!) and lined up the X’s, and then stitched on the bias, just like I had done to join my fabric into one long continuous strip. And it worked! Honestly, it’s a little bit of magic every time. Then I only had to stitch down that last section of binding.
Alas, that was the last of the magic I got to enjoy on this project, because this is where I realized I’d cut and attached binding that was too narrow. I suppose a smarter, more dedicated quilter would have ripped out the binding seam, and started again with binding that was the right width. But I can be stubborn. ( “I can make this work!” The cry of the deluded amateur quilter…) Since I’d stitched the binding onto the back of the quilt, that seam was visible on the front panel, about 1/4” from the edge. I needed the binding to reach past that seam to cover it up. But the binding was just too short. I ended up wrestling it all the way, doing only 3-4 stitches at a time before I had to stop and yank the next section over and hold it in place with my little awl. I only managed to do about 2/3 of the binding before my hand was cramping so badly that I just stopped and left it for the next day. The mitered corners ended up quite messy, since I didn’t really have enough fabric to make them crisp and clean, but I decided to live with that too.
So…it’s far from perfect (as with all my quilting projects, apparently) but it’s done, it’s attractive, and it should be durable enough to stand up to hard usage by a small child, which is really all that can be asked of it. Because it’s relatively small, I was able to hang it on the back of a door to get a picture of it.
