Easy Baby Quilt Revisited

I decided to make my Easy Baby Quilt again. I have made this quilt twice already, but both times given it away. I have this gorgeous hedgehog fabric and thought it might be fun to stitch this up again.

I originally designed this to showcase cute fabric that was just too cute to cut up into smaller bitses. If you are interested in the pattern you can download this on the tab above under Free Patterns or you can follow along as I construct this myself. The pattern has been around now for a long time and has enjoyed some popularity. While this is not a formal Quilt-A-Long, I thought people might enjoy seeing me putting this together. Maybe you like to follow along...it's really very easy and comes together very quickly. If you got that cute, bright fabric this might be just the pattern for it.

Materials needed:

Materials:  

70 cm (3/4 yd) of white background fabric 

80 cm (7/8 yd) of blue dotty fabric for the blocks and binding  

70 cm (3/4 yd) of orange tone-on-tone fabric 

40 cm (1/2 yd) of feature fabric 

113cm x 143.5cm (44 1/2in x 56 1/2in) Backing fabric 

113cm x 143.5cm (44 1/2inx 56 1/2in) Batting 

Neutral Cotton thread for piecing 

Coordinating Cotton thread (e.g. Aurifil 50/2) for freemotion-quilting 

Rotary cutter, quilting ruler and mat 

General sewing supplies 

So, here is my selection of fabrics

How cute is that hedgehog fabric? I just got enough...it is 'Woodland Pals' by Ann Kelle for Robert Kaufman Fabrics. I wash all my fabrics and except for the white fabric this is ready to go. You might think that this is unnecessary, however I have had fabric bleed when washing quilts and I think it is just not worth it. I will also wash the white fabric to have a consistent feel to all of the fabric. Sometimes I starch my fabric...this really depends on what quality of fabric I am working with. If it is flimsy, I will starch it a bit to make it easier to work with.

After I done this I usually go onto my trusted EQ8 program to see what the potential quilt could look like. For this I  photographed the Woodland fabric (the other tone-on-tone fabrics can easily be matched by some of the thousands of fabric that comes with the program). The new EQ8 has an improved image worktable that allows you to import an image of  your fabric and then scale it to size. This makes importing fabric very easy (the only problem I had today was a slightly blueish tint-must be the light). I find the EQ8 program invaluable for just trying out different colour arrangements...find it really hard to visualise an entire quilt and the picture helps in just quickly seeing whether something works.

So, here is what this could look like

Hmm...that may need some developing...not quite 'there' for me.

Like this actually a little bit better with the orange spots in it...changes the pattern a bit and makes it look quite busy, but it goes with the 'busy' hedgehogs and in my mind pulls it all together. So the pattern needs to be changed up a bit. No stress...I will need less of the white background (of which I have got a fair bit) and some orange strips. If I count the orange squares above, it gives me 24 squares. A strip of 2 1/2in orange print cut across the width of fabric will give me 16, 2 1/2in squares (I know this as I got a table where I can look this up), hence I will only need 2, 2 1/2in orange strips. I think I have got a Fat Quarter, so that will make it 3, 2 1/2in strips across a Fat Quarter (in reality I probably need 4 strips to have some insurance for mis-cutting).

So, all set...this will become my Wednesday project!

Linking up to Midweek Makers over at Quilt Fabrication

Karin