Baby Quilt Reminiscing...

I found out completely fabulous news this morning, a good friend of mine is having a baby!!  Including our #2, that now means there are four pregnant ladies that I know who will bring bundles of joy into the world in the next few months.  This had me thinking about the baby quilts I've made through the years, while I try to inspire myself for the next round of handmade baby gifts.

The first baby quilt I made was for friends who had a baby six weeks before my son.  I started the project in the late summer of 2008 and gave it as a gift at the baby shower in October.  I enjoyed this quilt a lot because I got to use such a wide variety of fabrics.  I started working on this quilt the second I heard that the baby was going to be a boy, and I wanted to use blues and greens.  I enjoyed the hunt for fat quarters from fabric store to fabric store.  The pattern is an adaptation of a log cabin with fabrics arranged randomly.  Only the centers of the squares and the border were the same fabric.  I absolutely loved the end result.

It took almost two years to the day (July 2010) before I had another excuse to make a baby quilt.  Thank you iPhoto for dating my pictures because it looks like it took about the same span of time to finalize this quilt.  This was for an old school friend of my sister's who we hadn't seen in years.  As a result, we made this a sort of team effort.  Again this was for a boy and I liked to use blues and greens, but I wanted to go a bit brighter.  The friend had her wedding photos on Facebook and I noticed she really liked red, so I wanted that tied in as well.  This quilt involved more randomization in sizes and arrangement, but it added another element of surprise.  We essentially assembled the quilt with squares in straight rows.
Once that was completed, you made two cuts along specific locations so when you reconnected the three pieces, the rows then became diagonally placed.  You never know what the end result will look like until the very last step.  My sister has a knack for the actual quilting so she put a lovely random design on the large squares.  We finally got this one shipped off in October and again, it turned out really nice.




Then finally you remember my post about my latest baby quilt.  The rag quilt pattern was a ton of fun to make because again it was a completely unique process to me.  Again this was for a boy (there must be something in the water my friends are all drinking) and so the main color was blue, but I brought yellow more into the forefront.  I loved using a ton of randomized different fabrics.  I guess that's sort of the common theme between all the baby quilts I've made.  I also love collecting fabric, as I'm sure you'll read more about in future posts.