Sunday, March 17, 2013

Growing a Baby Quilt


There is a very full tub of scraps in my studio because whenever I have a left-over piece of fabric of anything more than 2" or so it goes into the tub.  And I sew a lot.

So I was happy to find a tutorial here for a Crazy Square Baby Quilt from Jennifer at Two Butterflies that looked good for our baby quilt group.  Basically it recommends cutting a 5" square, putting a scrap on a corner, right sides together, sewing, trimming, flipping the scrap back and squaring it off.  Then doing the same thing at the opposite corner.  I loved it because the scraps aren't put together with any kind of measuring so every block ends up just a little different than the others.  It ends up looking like what was on my design wall, below.     

 
But then I saw Andrea Johnson's tutorial here for what she calls a Modern Scrappy Baby Quilt.  Same blocks, just arranged in a different way, and I like hers even better.  And she's a big part of the Cincinnati Modern Quilt Guild, too.  My design wall now looks like what's below. 
 

Of course if you don't like the appearance of the casual designs, you could easily be more precise and actually measure or use an AccuQuilt like Andrea did.  And if you don't like the scrappy look they would be stunning in just two colors.  As a bonus, the blocks go together really fast.  

But back to that tub.  My quilt top is about 1/4 finished, and I haven't even made a DENT in that tub.  I was looking forward to seeing some fabrics I haven't seen for awhile, but that's not going to happen.  I hope we find some more scrappy designs for our baby quilts. 

1 comment:

Joanne S said...

And those plain areas are just the place for your lovely machine quilting practice, wink!