Baby number four’s quilt is done! All except embroidering his name on the back because…well…we still haven’t picked a name for him yet. Yikes! Hopefully we’ll decide soon! But in the mean time, I am so in love with how this half square triangle baby quilt turned out! It’s so colorful and fun!
It’s reading a little pastel-ish in this picture but it’s really very vibrant.
I went in to planning for the quilt with one thing in mind (a red and turquoise HST quilt) but when I got to the fabric store this color scheme just kept jumping out at me so I went with it. I used the backing fabric as my color scheme then picked coordinating patterned fabrics in those colors.
Though I have machine quilted my last two quilting projects (here and here), I decided to hand quilt this one. For one, I’ve hand quilted all of the other kids’ quilts so I wanted to make sure this baby’s was hand quilted too. And also I went out of town for a day and this was the perfect little project to take and work on while I was away from my machine. It didn’t take long at all since it’s such a small quilt.
Not only do I love seeing the finished project when it all comes together, but I also adore lining all my kids’ quilts up and seeing them together because they’re some of the things I’m most proud of!
If you want more details on any of these other quilts:
Half square triangle baby quilt tutorial
In full disclosure I have never written any sort of sewing tutorial before and I’m still so new to sewing/quilting that I really have no business doing so. But this was such a simple quilt that I wanted to at least try to explain how I made it in case it helps someone else.
What you need:
- 10 different colors/patterns of fabric for the triangles. 1/4 yard each would be more than enough, fat quarters should be plenty too (or more or less depending on what you have in your stash, how much variety you want, the color scheme you’re going with etc.)
- 1 yard of white (or other “background” fabric
- 1/4 yard for binding
- 1 1/2 yards backing fabric
- baby quilt sized batting (I used this one)
Directions:
Cut 4 6×6 squares from each of the 10 patterned fabrics. Cut 40 6×6 squares from the white fabric. Use whatever method suits you to turn those into 80 HSTs (I use this method where you sew the squares together, chain piece, and cut them into triangles).
Square them up into 5×5 blocks. I still am not great about being super precise in my sewing so I started with 6×6 blocks in order to give myself plenty of room before cutting them down to their final 5×5 blocks. If you don’t need that wiggle room you could either start with smaller blocks, or make your final blocks bigger (like 5.5×5.5).
When it’s all said and done you should have 80 HST blocks, 8 of each of your colors/patterns. It sounds like a lot but it really doesn’t take long to do this at all!
Then decide on your arrangement and sew the blocks together into an 8 block by 10 block rectangle. Make your backing, baste it, quilt it, bind it, and there you go!
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