Baby Boy quilt #1

About five years ago I had six friends who were having babies, and one was a two-for-one! I set out to make quilts for all those babies, and got a good start on them, but sadly, most are still sitting in the craft oasis in different stages of being finished.

This baby boy quilt was one of those projects.  I forget where I saw the idea of the columns of small strips with the border in between.  It's a great way to use up scraps and worked up pretty quickly.  Think of the possibilities with this quick pattern - white strips with red and green Christmas fabrics, black strips with Halloween fabrics, brown strips with pink baby girl fabrics.  

I cut the brown strips into 2 and a half inch strips from salvage to salvage.  The blue strips were also cut to 2.5 wide and 4 inches long (being that most of the fabrics were leftovers from other projects, I think that was as long as I could go). If you wanted to make the vertical strips longer, (if you were doing a project for a kid or adult) I think that would work as long as the widths of the strips are the same.

Once I had finished piecing, I wasn't quite sure how to quilt the layers together (which is why it sat for so long).  Stitching in the ditch along the brown borders was easy and an obvious way to quilt, but I was at a loss for how to quilt in the blue area.   My sewing machine is just a regular Singer, not designed specifically for quilting, so doing straight lines when quilting is all I have tried.

Since the Candy Corn quilt had turned out so well, I figured I would try something a little more complicated for the baby quilt.  I grabbed a star shaped cookie cutter and used that as my template to draw stars along the blue sections of the quilt.  Then I machine quilted each star.  It took a few stars to get the tension just right in my machine (it's always been a bit touchy with the tension controls) but I thought they turned out well.  I used the same brown strips for the binding and ta-da!  another UFO is finished. 

As the baby I started this for is now a five year old boy in Pre-K, who is probably much more interested in cars, dinosaurs, and superheroes, this quilt will go instead to a new baby boy, who is the long awaited son of one of Phil's oldest friends.  I wish they lived closer so we could visit and coo over the little man, but I am happy knowing that a dear friend will enjoy it for years to come.