Baby Quilt for Beginners

Hola mis amigos! I am REALLY craving chips and guac/salsa and a peach marg right now…only 30 more days of my Whole60 (psh! that’s nothing!) For now, I’ll just have to use what little Spanish I remember to get me by, and trust that you’ll partake in the margs for me. Today, I’m proud to say, that I completed one goal that I had set before Sophie turns one: make her a baby quilt. It was easier than I thought but took way longer than I’d planned.

I’d never made a quilt before, so this is definitely a baby quilt tutorial for beginners! I didn’t actually even ‘quilt’ because I didn’t sew the layers together, so I guess I just made a blanket. Oh well.
Here’s what you’ll need to make your baby quilt/blanket:

• Fabric for your squares (I bought a set of pre-cut squares)
• Batting
• Minky Fabric
• Thread
• Embroidery Thread
• Sewing Machine
• Pins & Basting Pins

I wanted to be sure none of the squares were duplicates next to each other so I laid out my design and snapped a photo. I then gathered all the squares according to their rows and divided them with a piece of paper. I went through the piles and pieced the squares together (good side facing each other) and ended up with my six rows.

To make all of the squares lay flat, I had to pin the seams apart to sew the rows together. This part was tedious and helped me see how terribly I’d sewed my rows together!

As always, there was a learning curve for this new project. I noticed after sewing for a while that there were tiny loops in my thread. This is a tension problem. My machine was set for a thicker material from my last project and needed to be re-adjusted. See your sewing machine manual on how to adjust your tension if you see these little loops. I didn’t rip out all the seams because there was too much by this point. It is not noticeable from the front and I ran the entire pieced together squares through the wash at this point to make sure it would stay together. It’s also a good idea to wash your fabric at this point to account for any shrinkage that might occur.

The next step was, by far, the hardest part of the entire project. Ironing the seams apart. This took forever, made my back sore and caused a few burns. There’s one thing I don’t do: ironing, and it showed! Thankfully it was a baby blanket rather than a full sized blanket! Next time I may have to pay someone to come over and iron. 🙂

Here’s where things really started to get going and all of my pieces were looking more like a quilt! I pinned the three layers (minky fabric, batting and quilt squares) together at various locations throughout the quilt with the basting pins. Using basting pins ensures that the quilt layers won’t shift around on you while you’re trying to sew things together. I pinned around all the edges to make sure everything was extremely solid. I used embroidery thread to tack the three layers together at the corners where the squares met. I don’t own a quilting machine and I didn’t want to hand quilt this project so I thought embroidery thread would be the next best thing.

Once all of the thread was holding the layers together, I cut the excess batting and minky fabric to fit the quilt squares. I then sewed along the the border of the quilt making sure the minky fabric was face up. Minky is a very stretchy material. I’d read so many blogs on how to use a special foot for your machine but it seemed to work perfectly with the foot that came standard on my Brother.

TADAAAAA! Everything is sewn together! I trimmed all the edges to make a shallow border and added a little heart in the corner with embroidery thread.

I’m giving Sophie her quilt for her Birthday next month (OMG NEXT MONTH) but she was sorta playing in her room where I wanted to shoot, so she’s seen her beautiful quilt. Really, she just wanted to throw it around a bit. So, how do you guys think I did for my first quilt? Have you ever made a quilt for a loved one? Although Sophie won’t really care when I give her quilt to her, I’m sure she’ll appreciate it as she gets older.