quilted baby blanket

Actually, I guess this project was my first step back into sewing. I started this baby quilt for Trenton before he was born and was able to give it to him just before his first birthday. I had never made a quilt before and I must admit that I don't love quilting. I absolutely enjoy piecing together the quilt top but once that is finished, the rest in kind of boring. I simply lost interest after I quilted the top, but I did manage to pin all the layers together. I think I would have plowed through given my bursts of energy late in my pregnancy, but I hit a creative wall when I had to decide how to stitch the layers together.

After almost 12 months, reality hit me and I decided that I had procrastinated much too long. So I just began sewing the layers together using a straight stitch back and forth across the blanket (well, first I sewed down the middle top to bottom and left to right to hold everything in place). I describe it this way because I did not take any care to make the lines symmetrical or evenly spaced. I just sewed at angles until I reached the top.

The binding was more fun than sewing the layers together, so that part went by pretty quickly. These last parts took me a whole 3 hours, so now I understand that even though it's not that fun, sewing the layers together really doesn't take much time.

I learned a lesson about stitch lengths after this project was complete: I used (what I know understand is called) the basting stitch--the really long stitch that is meant to only temporarily hold the fabric together. I think that my thread tension was wrong, too, but I definitely needed to use a regular stitch length to ensure the stitches stayed in place.

We put the quilt in Trenton's crib because it's warm, but he's not thrilled with it (he prefers his softer fleece blanket). It's a good thing, though, that he doesn't like it too much or I would have to requilt the entire thing--some of the stitches are already unraveling.