A Baby Quilt in Three Parts, part 1

Each time one of my grandmothers passed away, I was the lucky one to inherit their craft supplies.  I love that I shared my hobbies with them.  I now find myself in the predicament of having more fabric and yarn that I might ever know what to do with.  Well, one of my cousins just had her second baby this month, and since baby Michael is the first great-grandchild since my grandma passed away, I thought I would make him a quilt with some of the fabric that I inherited from my grandmother.  To me, it seemed like a way to share a piece of my grandmother with my cousin and her new baby, and I hoped it would mean a lot to her.  There was just one problem.  You see, other than having my mom help me assemble a quilt top when I was much younger, I haven't actually ever made a quilt.  So what did I do?  Eh, I just winged it.  (Ball-eyed it for those of you who know what that means.)  To quote a great movie, "What, like it's hard?"  I was about to find out.


The first thing that I did, though, was choose my color palette.  That was the fun part.  I found a lot of blue quilting cotton in my grandma's stash, and after weeding out all of the flowery options, I was left with about 5 good sized pieces.  I added an aqua remnant left over from a project I did with a friend and a cream piece that I had laying around.  And just to give it some extra punch, I added a green snake-skin print.  We just won't tell anyone that in a former life, that piece was meant to be a skirt.  Anyway, with the fabrics chosen, it was time to proceed.

When my mind enters in to the creative process, it tends to fall back on its math skills.  I basically just outlined a rough grid in my head.  I would sew patches into rows, and then sew the rows together to make the quilt top.  I measured enough to try to keep my quilt square, but once I got going, I just went with my gut.  Here is the quilt taking shape.

So far, so good.  I just love how the colors turned out.  I surprised myself at how much I like this color scheme, and it was at this point that I thought maybe I should just keep this for myself.  Nobody would ever know the difference.  But that is not why I started this project, so I decided not to do this.  I do have to admit that another thought ran through my mind, and that was that it might just be possible for me to have a son.  If any of you tell my husband I will deny it up and down though.  [Please don't read this as anything negative towards boys or parents of boys or people who want to have boys.  I just have always wanted girls, that's all.]


Stay tuned for parts two and three of this project.  There is a good ending.


Can we just look at the color combination one more time?

ahhhhh...