KatyQuilts

Life has been more than a little stressful lately. I decided I needed to get back into the sewing room for a low stress project. I started with this stripe I bought at least 5 years ago:

I lined up the stripes as carefully as I could and cut quarter square triangles and made these:

I probably had enough for a lap quilt but since I gave away all my baby quilts, I need a few of those on hand. So I decided I could make a way to stretch these into two baby quilts. I could divide into ten blocks a piece like this:

Or this:

Or maybe the first one will only have 9 blocks like this:

Hmmm…..maybe this:

Or this:

I like that one better but this is what I ended up with:

I added 2 1/2″ white strips around each, log cabin style, and then trimmed them to 9 1/2″. I will add a plain white border and then use some strip for the binding.The colors are more dark purple and teal than it shows here on my monitor.

I think I like this. Now what to do with those other 11 blocks?

Until next time….

Despite dealing with a lovely cold  my husband so kindly shared with me, I did actually finish something this week! Yesterday I put the top together and quilted this baby quilt. I usually pre-wash everything but the green fabrics for this were purchased as a roll of fat eighths. I hate washing tiny pieces so I decided to use unwashed bleached muslin as well and go for it. One thing I do like about this is the shrinkage you get when it is washed after quilting. This is before:

And this is after washing:

Maybe you can see the shrinkage better here:

The binding is entirely done by machine. This has caused me some problems in the past….I have had the edges ripple because the binding didn’t want to shrink as much as the rest. I think this may be due to the top stitching I was doing. This time I decided to use a narrow zig zag instead of a straight stitch for the final stitching and it worked great! No rippling at all. For a baby quilt, I really like the idea of a totally machine stitched binding. That baby won’t care! I will definitely do that again.

In case you are interested, the center rectangles were cut 5″ x 8 1/2″ and the strips surrounding them were cut at 2 1/2″ wide. I didn’t have a pattern for this, you really don’t need one. I just had an idea in my head and wanted to use the fat eighths I had as efficiently as possible. I just have a few scraps left. I didn’t want to keep track of  pre-washed and un washed scraps so I either use it all up or throw them out! I ended up with very little waste. The finished quilt measures approx. 32″ by 48.”

Until next time….