Baby Quilt – Animal House

I just realized I haven’t blogged about this quilt I made at the end of last year yet,

I am writing it today, despite how long it has been and how gone it is from my home too.

This quilt went to a new baby, my best friend’s first little one.

I call it the Animal House Baby Quilt.

I do love blogging about finishes, but I think I love blogging the quilt-making process too. One of the reasons for me keeping a blog was to keep a journal of the quilts I make.

When I write about them, I ponder and learn what I like and what I don’t. By doing so, it allows to me understand my style better.

Now, I wish I knew a lot already, but I am still searching for the style I love by experimenting lots of new-to-me things. That is why you’ll see a pop of everything in the quilts I make.

I am still in that process of looking for my style,

but.. on the other hand, maybe because I love the learning process too much to stick to one kind of style too. Whatever it is, I really just want to have fun. And for now, I find new things to try are fun.

There are affiliate links within this post, please find my full disclosure here.

The making of Animal House Baby Quilt

Since this quilt hasn’t got its own post yet, I am going to go through the process of making it and the finish too.

The fabrics were chosen based on the main fabric which was the one with animals. The fabric is Critter Patch Organic by Alyssa Thomas.

(Read more about my process of picking fabrics for a quilt here)

I had just finished browsing at the time and was inspired to do a little fussy cut job myself. I decided that I was going to fussy cut all the little critters and put them into a house block.

I roughly drew the block in Inkscape and started cutting the fabrics.

(For now, I am using Inkscape to design my quilts while I’m saving up for EQ8 or a subscription to Adobe Illustrator. You can do the same too if you are interested, Inkscape is FREE)

I used a plastic sheet to cut out the template. If you are looking for vinyl plastic sheets to make templates, check out this one. It has 5-star reviews – having the grid would really help. I just made a mark in the center to make sure things are centered.

I cut out all the pieces and place them on my portable design boards and off I go to chain piecing them. It went pretty quickly.

The making of the blocks was pretty easy.

I then decided to offset the houses, so I put a sashing in between them, which offset them slightly creating a staggered look. This was something new-to-me. I have always wanted to try piecing quilts like this.

This was just a simple offset. But it was fun to do.

Free Motion Quilting Fun

After piecing them all together, I then basted the piece and jumped right into my favourite part. The quilting.

With these blocks, I already knew that I wanted to play around more with the quilting. I wanted to incorporate some wood grain quilting, brick looking motifs, spirals and scallops for the rooftop!

(Read Here: How to quilt woodgrains motifs)

It was fun to quilt this quilt. Sometimes I forgot how much fun it is to make small quilts. I love the quick finish, and the ease to move this quilt under my domestic machine.

It was also a great piece to experiment with.

I love the finish, but I think it could have done better with some pebbles to break up the spirals backgrounds.

As usual, I am using my for all the areas. I love that this colour easily blends in all kind of colour fabrics. Even if it does show up, it shows up in a good way, not taking over the fabrics.

As for the colours of the fabrics, these may not be my usual go-to colours. It was fun to play with it, but it didn’t feel like me. I was hesitant to make the quilt with it a little, but I have the fabric bundle made a long time ago. I made the bundle saying to myself, that if I need a baby quilt, this would be next.

So here it is.

All done, bounded in grey stripey fabrics. Gifted and hopefully my friend is loving it too.

You can clearly see here the quilting I did on each of the houses. Some were woodgrain, some were weeds, and the others are brick-like quilting. I left the animal unquilted, though now after lookign at this photo, I felt like I should have traced around each of the animals to make it pop up a little.

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