Whoa Baby!

So many people I know are pregnant. I guess that comes with growing up! Two sisters that attend my church were pregnant at the same time. One had her baby girl in June (and I made her a quilt that I posted about previously). She didn’t know what she was having, so her quilt was gender neutral. The other sister is having her baby any day now, and I made her a boy baby quilt filled with blues and greens.

The pattern I used is called a nine-patch frame quilt. I love how it turned out!

First, here are the fabrics that I used

My favorite fabric was the cute blue and green one that said “I love Mommy, I love Daddy.” As soon as I saw it I knew it would be perfect for the snowball blocks (which you’ll see more of later). First step was to cut the green polka dot, dark blue, and blue plaid into strips.

Then I sewed two blue strips on the outside of a green strip. I also sewed two green strips on the outside of a blue strip (made double the amount of these). I ironed the completed strips and cut them down with a rotary cutter.

To make a nine-frame patch I sewed the newly cut strips together, making blocks that are checked.

On the outside of these nine frame blocks, I sewed a plaid strip on each side of the square. On the corners is a square of the same dark blue fabric that is on the inside of the square.

That is a finished version of one type of block that is in the quilt. The other type is a snowball block. The large part of the snowball block is made of the “I love Mommy, I love Daddy fabric” with corners from the green polka dot. I cut a large square from the love fabric and small squares from the green fabric. On the small squares I marked a diagonal line from corner to corner and used that as my sewing line.

I then sewed the small squares to each corner of a large square. Once the squares were trimmed and ironed they looked like this.

Once all the blocks were made, I sewed them into strips. Some strips had 3 checked blocks and 2 snowball blocks and some had 3 snowball and 2 checked blocks. When all the strips were sewn I laid them out on the floor to see what the quilt would look like. I made sure to put the blocks in an alternating pattern.

Then I sewed all the strips together. The hardest part of this was to make sure that my seams all matched!

I love the diagonal pattern that the blocks create! Once the top was mostly pieced I put on the borders. There was a thinner border of light blue gingham and a thicker border of the plain dark blue fabric. That is the last thing to piece on the top of the quilt.

Then comes my least favorite part- pinning the three layers together. I laid down the backing, batting, and top on the floor. Using safety pins I pinned all the layers together, working from the center out.

(And yes Maggie is quite the camera hog). Since the batting and backing were a bit bigger than the quilt I trimmed both a bit smaller than the top of the quilt. This is to allow room for binding.

For this quilt I used the stitch in the ditch method of quilting (for my next one I’m using a meandering stitch and I’m obsessed with it). Stitch in the ditch just means to follow the seams of the top of the quilt. You basically get straight lines, squares, etc.

Once the layers are quilted together, I flipped over a bit of the top onto the back and folded it over. Then I used an invisible stitch to secure the binding.

Here is the (almost) finished product (unfortunately I did not get a picture of the finished quilt because it had to be given as a gift).

I love it! And I think it would be adorable in pink and purple for a girl too!

-Carolyn