Monday, February 16, 2009

My favorite baby quilt

I have made a lot of baby quilts over the years. For about the last ten years, I've made variations on one pretty exclusively. FromKaffe Fassett's Patchwork and Quilting Book Number 2, (ISBN 0-9672985-1-2) published by Westminster Fibers, Inc. of Amherst, New Hampshire; ©2000 in Great Britain by Rowan Yarns, it's called the African Stripe Baby Quilt.

I add borders to make it a little larger, but follow his recommendation of using nine different striped fabrics. I now have so many different striped fabrics that they have their own bin!

Often, I will find a backing fabric that I like and then I'll let that suggest the color scheme for the quilt. That was the case with this one. The quilt is for a baby boy born right before Christmas, and when I saw the polar bear fabric, I grabbed it. I chose nice tone on tone polka dots for the borders.

Yellow, blue, and red are a perfect a perfect triadic harmony.

I found lots of nice combinations of the colors in striped fabric. All fabric is prewashed. I like to make baby quilts that can be used and thrown in the wash.

The basic unit is a two and a half inch square. In most cases, one can get 16 or 17 squares from a two and a half inch strip of fabric.

One of the things that makes the design interesting is that the number of squares of each of the nine fabrics is different. The book includes a color coded design for their arrangement to which I've added numbers. I line my piles of squares up on a piece of adding machine paper and then look at the diagram to arrange the squares.

Here's the top about halfway in the layout.

The whole top is just the right size to fit on my work table.

In my next post, I'll talk about speed piecing techniques I use to put the body of the quilt together.

1 comment:

Lisalou said...

I am really liking your baby quilt. Thanks for sharing!!