The Baby Clothes Quilt

We'll start with the final project!  She loved it!  I made the accents lime green because that is her favorite color and I was trying to minimize the pink since that is her least favorite color and that is the most common color of clothing she had as a baby/toddler.

This was quite the project and the main reason I got so far behind on my blog.  I started out thinking of something like on A Girl With a Glue Gun, but then midway through I changed my mind and decided to go for the "Log Cabin" style quilt with baby clothes blocks in the middle.  I have never done this style before, but I have a quilting book that described it very well and it seemed pretty easy.  (Ha! It was not hard, but still time consuming!)  Since so many of the clothes were too small and I ended up with a million sizes, I had to piece them to get a 12" square when they were all laid out together (that is not the final square dimensions.)  Then I trimmed them down to 10.5" square due to some pregnancy brain discrepancies.

This was me laying them out to figure out where each block should go to keep several similar pieces away from each other.  The missing square was because as I was working on the quilt, I was also embroidering a picture that I drew of a girl praying and holding a rosary.  I also embroidered the date of her 1st Communion on there.  This was done watching movies with my husband in the evenings every know and then.  It was the last square to be finished.

The most boring and labor intensive part was cutting flannel backings for all the fabrics that seemed flimsy (that was most of them).  I went with this instead of fusible webbing because I thought it would be stronger and easier.  I have never done either, so what do I know?  Fusible webbing is probably fine, I was just loath to learn a new thing when the flannel backing seemed so self-explanatory.

Here I had sewed the "Log Cabin" strips in an alternating pattern.  

Sewing in alternating patterns should have been easy.  I laid everything out and took pictures.  Counted how many of each and put them in piles of which one should have the long strips horizontal and which ones vertical.  Again...Ha!  Easier said than done when you are a forgetful and scatterbrained pregnant woman with too many irons in the fire.  The top row is not alternating.  I about cried when I noticed this.  I drug Brian in from his playhouse project and asked his opinion as to whether or not I should take some apart to fix this.  (I did play around with it to see if I could just change the order and make them alternating, but because I wanted a specific block in the middle and a couple of other details it just wasn't going to work.)  Anyway, Brian is my perfectionist husband who is my biggest critic when it comes to my projects.  He is the only one that will straight up tell me something just isn't right.  Usually, I don't care at that point because I don't have time to redo things.  However, this time I would have done it if he said it looked obvious because I had already put so much work into it and it was for a very special occassion.  Thankfully, I went with the same color for the short and long strips and he said, "Kelle, seriously, you would have to show me for me to notice that."  I told myself  that I was moving on.  After all, with Genna's birthday party and the whole communion shebang I didn't have much time left.

After I finished the final block with the embroidery, I sewed together the big blocks in strips.  The back was a flannel fabric that I picked out to match the green on the front and also bring in the other colors from the front.  It was just shy of being long enough so I added a strip of a few more mementos from Hannah's baby clothes/blankets.  I also cut out her initials and sewed them onto this strip.  

The initials didn't show up as well as I had hoped.

Next I lined up the three layers and pinned them together as much as I could stand 5 days before her 1st Holy Communion.  For my baby quilts, I usually just tie them off, but I have done one "stitch in the ditch" quilt before.  Since this was such a bigger quilt than I was used to, I went with "stitch in the ditch" thinking it would be faster. I just had a layer of flannel in between (not batting that can move around so much) which brought me to think that a ton of top stitching wasn't necessary.  I just stitched in the ditch around the baby block squares.  I thought I could always go back later and add more if I decide it needs more, but I really think it will be fine.

The last step was putting on the satin binding that I bought at Joann's just like I used for Drew's faux chenille baby blanket.  Since I had done it before and I had tried enough new things I figured I'd go with what I know this time.  I finished it on Wednesday.  Whew!  Now I need to plan ahead more for Genna's quilt for next year so I don't get down to the wire again.  Maybe I can talk her into something really easy for her birthday party next year, like maybe a substitute family activity, to make the time less stressful and crazy for me.  She'll get a party for her 1st Communion anyway.  I better start planting seeds now.  :)
  

This shows the correct alternating pattern of the "Log Cabin" pieces if you can see it.  It also has Hannah's baptism gown (the white eyelet fabric) because we have since purchased a nicer one and hers had stains from a rather large pooping incident from her baptism that Hannah loves to hear the stories about.

This was one of the more complicated to fit together blocks.

This is a close-up of part of the strip on the back where I got to squeeze this part of a t-shirt from when Brian was gone for a year.  "Kleine Maus" means little mouse in German and that was Brian's nickname for her when she was younger.