A New Baby Quilt

Even before we technically knew the gender of our youngest, I knew she was a girl.  I'm 2 for 2 in that department.  I was so sure of my feeling that I found this pretty blue flowered fabric one day and decided that I would use it to make her quilt.  I followed the idea from Young House Love because I didn't want to spend my time downstairs at my sewing machine.  I wanted to be able to make this quilt from my comfy spot on the couch binge watching The Great British Baking Show. Best competition show in history.  I think it's the lack of suspenseful music and horrifically long pauses before someone gets kicked off.

Ah yes, back to the quilt.  I bought 1/2 yard of the flowered fabric to make my binding and I found embroidery thread that matched the colors in the fabric and also bought a yard of quilted white fabric from JoAnnes.  After some reading, I learned that embroidery thread may not be the best idea for this because as the quilt is washed the thread can shrink or deteriorate faster than the rest of the quilt. I haven't had an issue yet but its something to think about!

I cut a piece of embroidery thread about the width of the quilted fabric and started in the middle for each line of stitching.  That way, I wouldn't have such a long long piece of thread to work with.  I just followed the corners of the quilted fabric so I had nice straight lines, and tried to keep my stitches approximately the same length. Once I got to the end, I left a couple of inches of the thread hanging off while I moved on to the next color.

After I finished the Great British Baking Show, I was left with this:

I was nervous about adding the homemade binding without securing the tails of my stitches first, so I ran the two quilt sides through my sewing machine with a tight zig zag stitch to take the thread down better.  I cleaned up the tails of thread, and sewed down my homemade binding (google search purl bee for a great tutorial on bias binding and finishing).

Homemade binding

I'm in love with how this quilt turned out.  It took a long long time with that embroidery thread, but it was pretty mindless work.

I've been keeping up with the same thing I did for my son and snapping her picture on it weekly to track her size.  So sweet!