A New Quilt! (Finally!) My Cousin’s Baby Quilt

I finished a new quilt–just in time for the baby shower (yesterday) and before graduate school starts up again (tomorrow)! Most of the patterned rectangles are from pre-cut 2 1/2″ strips, and a very few (five fabrics, I think? No more than that, definitely) were from actual yardage or fat quarters.

2 1/2″ strips are commonly sold in collections of 40 strips each (usually an entire fabric collection’s worth) and are called jelly rolls. I love collecting them (so pretty! so many new fabrics all at once!), but am very slow to use them up. I have a tendency to want to wait for the “perfect” project to use them in–and what’s more perfect than a new baby?

The pattern is called Sparkling Gemstones from the book Jelly Roll Quilts from Pam and Nicky Lintott. I made it baby sized by using less strips (20) and cutting them in half before sewing them in pairs to give the individual blocks more variety. There’s 49 squares in the quilt–I had enough left over to piece two 3 square by 3 square pillow tops–the one I gave away with the quilt is in the upper right hand corner of the picture. I might turn the other one into something else later–a tote, maybe?–I haven’t yet decided.

The backing is a textured aqua colored minky fabric that Mini Moe #2 picked out and then didn’t want to relinquish her hold on (so soft!) in the quilt store so that it could be put in the bag. I quilted it on my regular machine, using a walking foot and stitching in the ditch with a variegated pastel thread.

My cousin (the same one for whom I made the wedding quilt that’s on the Quilts page) has been sending pictures of the baby’s room as they’ve been working on getting it ready, so I used those pictures as inspiration when choosing my fabrics. Most of them are floral and/or have butterflies on them–the background fabric is white on white roses–but there is one adorable baby fabric included that had flowers and butterflies along with several adorable woodland animals.

Close ups of two of the blocks:

I watched the Olympics (and a few true crime shows when the track and field competitions went on a little too long) while picking the fabrics, cutting, and piecing the top and listened to Sandra Brown’s latest book, Sting, while quilting and doing the binding. It’s a nail biter!

I’m really happy with how it turned out and am pretty bummed to be putting away my sewing machine for the new semester…

Oh, well…May 2017 will get here…eventually… 🙂