Baby Girl Quilt Finish: Hugs and Kisses

Sharing a recent finish in this post. A baby quilt for my daughter. 

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This quilt started around the time I got my Accuquilt Go! a couple of months ago. 

I fell in love with the pattern immediately after seeing it on the Accuquilt box and decided to make the cut for the quilt right after I was done trimming my scraps down to usable pieces. 

You can read a lot more on that here in this post where I talk about cutting scraps with Accuquilt and here where I did a video unboxing my Accuquilt Go! set. 

I also started this project with experimenting starching my fabrics with homemade starch, and I am happy to say that I love this method of starching to the end of making this quilt.

I love, love, love the final look of this quilt and I must say that I feel like I don’t want to wash it now that I love the feel of the quilt with the fabric starched. It is all neat and tight. Perfect for displaying, I suppose.

But, since I am going to let my daughter use this quilt, I am going to put it in the washer. And I’ll remember to put a colour catcher too cause I saw some reds bleeding into the polka dots as I was starching the fabrics… let’s hope the colour catcher will do its job. 

I am using fabric from my stash for this quilt and I did not buy any new fabrics for the quilt which was a win for someone who loves to take a chance at buying fabrics anytime, any day. Haha.

Choice of Fabrics

The fabric for the quilt top were from my stash, mostly they are Art Gallery Fabrics and some are the Pearl Bracelets design I have hoarded in different colours. If you’ve sewn with Art Gallery Fabrics before you’d know that they are so soft and lovely. And I find that starching them works perfectly for a smoother piecing experience. 

The backing is also from my stash, from an older line of Bonnie and Camille. It is definitely worth to finally use this piece for this quilt. The fabric is a cheater fabric with circles in a square grids and I don’t really know how to make use of it if I cut it into smaller pieces. So, it was great that it was just enough to back this baby quilt.

Pink Quilting Fabrics

If you want to build a pink fabric stash, here’s my suggestion:

• Coraline AGF bundle
• Edyta Sitar’s Sweet 16 has a good range of Pinks and Reds
• Or you can shop around for your favourite Pink fabric from a wide selection right here.

Quilting Tools and Notions I used:

• My trusted workhorse, Janome Horizon Memory Craft QCP8200
• So Fine Thread for piecing
• Accuquilt Go! to cut all the pieces (Accuquilt on Amazon)
• My new favourite Navy Blue Rotary Cutter for trimming blocks
• Large cutting Mat
• Wool ironing Mat (I have no issues with the smell, but sometimes it can burn if the iron is way too hot and no steam)
• Travelling steam iron (I love this Iron, so much easier to use small iron when pressing small units)
• Sets of Trimming Rulers (small rulers makes a difference when you need to trim small units)
• Mini Rotating Mat (mainly used to trim the units before piecing them together) 

Y-seam piecing

The piecing of the quilt went pretty fast although I was pretty annoyed that one of the block is made with Y-seams. This may have been unnecessary if cut differently, but since the cut was made using the Accuquilt cutter, this was probably the best method for the ‘x’ block of this quilt. 

Either way, I braved myself through the Y-seams.  I can say that at the end of it all, I was getting good at it. I have done it before but it is not something that I do often. So the skill is basically rough to start with. 

I did find that sewing through the starched pieces were easier but it does still need some careful pinnings and care to get the best on accuracy. 

I decided to make fewer quilt blocks than the patterns call for because I thought I wanted just a small quilt.. but once I got all the blocks pieced together, I felt like the quilt was way too small. 

Adding borders to the quilt

So I added a border. And then I decided to piece a scrappy top and bottom border to add to the length of the quilt. I purposely chose not to add the scrappy border on the right and left side as I wanted to keep the quilt less than 40″ so that I can easily use a 44″ wide fabric as the backing without having to piece it together. 

Free Motion Quilting Loopy Hearts

To match the quilt, I chose a loopy heart design to quilt it. This design is super quick to do and so cute! You can try it out. Try doodling it out first, you can find the how-to in this post here for this loopy heart design. 

So many hearts in a heart. This is the fabric I am worried about bleeding when it is going in the washer. You can see some of the red colour already bleed to the pearl bracelets. And that was from the starching process. Oopsy, I am not a pre-wash kind of quilter. 

Machine Binding

I did the usual, machine binding using a soft coloured binding fabric. There was only a fat eight of the fabric and it wasn’t enough to bind all around the quilt. I had to add another “accent” fabric as I always do with my bindings.

It is always a great option to be able to piece the binding from different fabrics whenever we don’t have enough fabrics. 

This is very ‘me’. Planning and changing as I go. Hardly ever that I get everything prepared from the beginning. 

How about you? Do you get all the fabrics ready first before even starting a project? The backing, the binding and all?

Quilt Finish

Well, I think it turned out lovely if I can say so myself. I love all the things about it. 

The look, the colours, the final size of it and the quilting I did. 

My baby girl approves it too.

Now onto my other projects and my boy’s quilt too.

Did you watch the other projects that I made progress on this May? What are you working on this month? Let me know in the comment. I would love to hear all about it.