January's Handmade Gift

I decided to start my year of Handmade Gifts (see this page or the tab at the top of this blog for more info) by making a quilt!  I have to admit although I love starting quilts I have never actually finished one... I tend to lose interest after piecing the top and move onto something else so this was quite a personal challenge for me too.

My best friend is having her first baby, a girl due in March, so I decided to make a baby quilt for her.  Coats Crafts kindly sent me samples of the new V & A collection (on sale this month I believe) which is called Bhandari  the collection has strong colours and prints inspired by traditional Indian fabrics.

It may not be the obvious choice for a baby quilt but my friend loves pink, and I didn't want to make something too babyish that the baby would grow out of quickly. I wanted to make it fairly large and in a fabric which would hopefully appeal for a few years.

The exact fabrics I received are above.  I decided to pull out the turquoise one and add in a few pink Kona Solids which matched the pinks in the fabrics.  The prints are quilt bold so it needed some solids to break them up a bit, and to add in more pink.  In total I used 8 fat quarters but had about 1/3 of each left over at the end so I could done it with less.

I decided to cut the squares 6 inches, and have 5 rows across and 6 rows length ways.  I started by laying all the squares out on my new cutting table to decide on the layout, I wanted to make sure each row and none of the same fabrics, and none of the same fabrics were next to each other but other than that the order would be random.

I then pieced one row at a time, putting them back on the table after sewn so I didn't lose track with what was going where.  For the backing I had a piece of fleece from Abakhan Fabrics which I thought would be ideal.  It was navy blue, and would be nice and soft against the baby and keep her warm too.

 I decided to quilt it diagonally across the squares, which created larger squares in the quilt as you can see in the picture above.  For the binding I opted for pink pre-cut bias binding.  I wanted to make the overall quilt a little pinker as there is more purple than pink in the fabrics.

Below is a picture of the finished quilt, my first ever quilt finish!  Plus I did the whole thing in under a month (I started mid Jan).  I only get the odd hour here and there to sew so normally projects drag on for months but this challenge to do one per month made me do it a lot quicker than I normally would as I was conscious of finishing before the end of the month.  I cut it bit fine and finished 6pm on the 31st Jan!

My next project will be a mother's day present, I had intended to make an embroidered notebook cover but my mum was flicking through my new craft books a couple weeks ago and spotted something she wanted.  A yarn holder from Sew-Licious: Little Things by Kate Hexall. my mum uses larger balls of yarn than the ones it is made for so I'll have to make a larger version for her but hopefully it won't be too difficult  to adjust the pattern.

The one in the book is pictured below.  I haven't decided on fabrics yet but I'm considering using the striped fabric from the new Amy Butler collection ,Violette.

Yarn holder from Sew-Licious: Little Things by Kate Haxell published by Cico.

To find out more about the fabrics I used visit the Coats Crafts website.