Hudson’s quilt

Hudson’s quilt is finished!

This stack of fabric

has turned in to this beautiful baby quilt.

Sigh.  I love it so much.

When I first started thinking about Hudson’t quilt I (of course) turned to Pinterest for inspiration.  I looked at tons and tons of baby quilts and just quilts in general, but I kept coming back to this one and this one.  At first I balked a little at how simplistic they were and thought “Shouldn’t I make something more intricate for my baby?”, but since the basic stripes were hands down my favorite design I just decided to go with it.

Over fall break I headed to Whittle’s, a little fabric store about 30 minutes from here (and also online if you’re interested), and found 12 different fabrics to use for the quilt as well as the rest of the nursery.

Other than the quilting, this was super quick to put together.  I did all of it (minus the quilting and binding) in one day over fall break.  Figuring out the math was the most time consuming part just because I had to try various combinations of strip widths before I was finally happy.  Just in case you want to make one for yourself, I thought I’d include my measurements for you and save you a step.

The quilt has 12 different fabrics, two strips from each, for a total of 24 strips.  I cut:
four 1.5 inch strips (two from one pattern and two from another)
four 2 inch strips (again, two from one pattern and two from another)
four 2.5 inch strips
four 3 inch strips
four 3.5 inch strips
four 4 inch strips

I placed one from each pattern in an arrangement I liked, sewed them together, and then repeated that pattern once more.

Here’s something I learned: press your seams to one side or the other rather than pressing the open.  At first I was pressing them open because I liked how they laid nice and flat when I did that, but I guess that was stretching the fabric a little because each stripe got more and more curved as I went along.  I switched to just pressing the fabric to one side and that seemed to help.  I’m sure there are other ways to avoid the pieces curving but I have no idea what that might be.

My finished quilt is about 38 inches wide and 49 inches long.

I knew I wanted to do something a little bit different to the back (rather than just one plain piece of fabric) but I wasn’t sure what exactly.  The back ended up being born out of necessity since I didn’t have enough of any one fabric for the back so I inserted the green panel to make it big enough.  I really like how the fat green stripe kind of echoes the skinnier stripes from the front.

Like I said, in that one day over fall break I got the quilt top designed, measured, cut, and sewn.  I cut and sewed the back, I pieced together my batting (I had some left over from some other quilting projects so I pieced them together to use for this quilt rather than buying more), and basted the whole thing together.

I hand-quilted it so that part has taken me a while.  I chose to do very simple quilting, just echo quilting next to each seam.  Then this week I was able to sign the quilt and put the binding on.  If you machine quilt I bet you could get this quilt done in less than two days.

Lots of people make labels for their quilts but so far (on the whole two quilts I’ve ever done), I’ve chosen to embroider my label.  I’m already hand quilting and hand binding, so I don’t mind the time it takes to do hand embroidering.  It’s not the neatest label ever (I haven’t embroidered in probably 15 years so it’s pretty sloppy), but it’s meaningful and that’s what matters to me.

The green didn’t show up quite as well against the plaid as I expected so it’s not that easy to read, but it says “to Hudson, Love Mommy, November 2013”.

And here it is in the nursery (plus a little nursery sneak peek – we’re not quite finished but getting so close and I can’t wait to show you the whole thing!)

I can’t wait to get a picture of Hudson with his new quilt…less than three more months!!