quick baby gift | finchley street

I didn’t have a lot of requests for mother’s day. My little girl is too small to make me breakfast in bed (in fact, a whole night of sleep would be a big enough win in my book… and I didn’t get that!) and so my one wish was for some sewing time. My mother’s day wish came true!

Here’s the product. All done in a matter of about 3 hours, this quilt top:

It was made without a pattern, but was really very easy. Here’s how it is done:

From 10 fat quarters, I cut 20 squares with 10″ sides. Then I grouped the squares into 5 groups of 4 each, and I tried to mix up the patterns so that there was an even distribution of the more plain colours (yellow, pink and navy) among the patterned fabrics.

Then I took all of the 10″ squares and cut them down the diagonal to create triangles. I sewed two contrasting triangles together, pressed them and then cut them in half along the other diagonal.

Then, I paired two of the resulting units together and sewed them along the long hypotenuse to make a square again, but now a square with 4 colours in each!

Then it was just a matter of laying the blocks out into 5 rows of 4, and joining it all together.

I sliced up the remainder of 8 of the fat quarters into 2.5″ strips, joined them together and have a scrappy binding ready for the final step of finishing this quilt.

It also means I have very little waste… just the scraps of two fat quarters. That makes me really happy!

This will be a gift for a friend of mine who has just had a little baby girl. I hope that she will love it. It might seem odd to have spent mother’s day sewing for someone else, but the pleasure for me is in the making, and honouring a new mother is so much fun. Plus, as I sewed I had a nice big pot of tea and listened to daggy musicals while my darling husband and daughter did the groceries. Win-win.

While you can’t see it in the picture, the backing I have laid it out with is a brushed cotton (flannelette) pink fabric with clouds all over it… a Kate and Birdie fabric for Moda. The fabrics on the quilt top are ones I picked up from the last quilt show I attended, and they are from Cloud 9 (though I can’t tell you much more about them than that!). They’ve got a nice Scandinavian flavour that is an unusual colour combination for me. It’s always nice to make something that’s a bit different.

The flanny backing should make it extra snuggly, while the top can be a cooler side for summer and for tummy time.

I can’t wait to get home and baste!

Have a great day,

Soooo… the weather is getting cooler here, and so I am getting the urge to work with flannelette again. Luckily, there are lots of babies arriving too, so I have a great excuse to make some more self-binding baby blankets.

If you want to know exactly how to make them, check out this old post of mine.

They can be whipped up in about 1/2 hr to an hour (depending on how fast a sewer you are…), I confess that I always find that cutting the fabric is the part that takes me the longest of all.

The hardest part now… is prising the finishing product away from my own little girl, so that I can give it away. Of course, it’s just an excuse to make one more! Once she felt how snuggly the material was, it was really hard to get her to let go. I can’t blame her, I suppose. I’m just as bad!