One night baby quilt

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I've done many baby quilts in the past--usually a pieced block quilt that I then hand quilt using my lap frame.  I haven't done one in a long time because...they take a long time!  My mom has taken up serious quilting and I wondered if maybe I could get back into it a bit, but in a way that wouldn't add another "not-yet-complete" project to my pile.  A quick internet search of baby strip quilts will yielded lots of inspiration. 

I have a very basic Singer sewing machine, and I didn't hold out much hope that it would be able to do quilting, but with the addition of a $10 Even Feed (Walking) Foot from Amazon, it handled it like a champ! Wow, buy one!


This quilt took me just under 5 hours from cutting to binding--maybe a bit less since I did take a break for dinner and to do a load of laundry. 

I followed the excellent instructions at Thirty Handmade Days and I had zero trouble with the pattern.  I won't put the tutorial here since you can use hers.  I did use my serger to sew all the strips together (no pins!)  instead of my sewing machine.  Also, next time I do this quilt, I would just quilt the along the seam one time.  The double line of quilting took about 90 minutes and my back was tired of leaning over the machine.


This is a good project to use up some of your fabric stash--the owl and alphabet prints I bought new, but the rest were fabrics that I needed to use up.  I'd say this quilt is a casual quilt, with plenty of crooked lines--but its still pretty cute.


The backing will need the most fabric, all the rest you can get away with about 1/3 a yard or less of each kind.  I used 6 different fabrics.  I also used the "cheater binding" method where the you cut the backing about 4 inches bigger than the finished top and then just fold over the back to make the binding.  I managed to not have quite enough backing, so rather than trim down my quilt front (42 inches across)  I made a 4 x 58 inch  strip with 3 of the leftover fabrics and sewed it to the edge of the backing so that my backing was 46x60.  My finished quilt is 42x54 inches.