A quilt for Baby King

I love quilts. For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of having a big wooden chest, filled with cozy blankets and beautiful quilts to keep my family warm. So I couldn't quite believe my luck when I married a man whose Mother makes the most beautiful hand stitched quilts. While I do not have the patience to hand stitch a quilt together, I have always intended on making a quilt (or two) for our baby. There is a whole lot of inspiration on the wonderful web when it comes to quilts (particularly this blog), and a while back I created a quilt inspiration board on Pinterest. For the most part, I pinned quite simple patterns, as it was far more realistic that I might actually start and finish a quilt in time for our baby's arrival if I didn't try something too complicated. True to form, I left it a little close to my due date to start and finish this quilt, but sometimes a little deadline helps to get the ball rolling.

The original pattern for this quilt comes from See Kate Sew and was brilliantly clear and easy to follow. I altered it ever so slightly, just to reduce the size of the quilt, but otherwise, I just followed the pattern on Kate's blog. I loved the fact that this quilt accommodates babies' ability to distinguish between strong contrast, rather than colours, as well as being beautiful. The fabrics I ended up using aren't as effective in creating the contrast that Kate's quilt does, but I still love it. I purchased all of the fabrics above from Poppy Patchwork, a wonderful local fabric shop that I love - you can also place orders online if you don't live locally. I also included some pink silk fabric that was left over from our wedding bunting, and the dark grey fabric was originally a pillowcase that I found for £1 in a second hand shop. 

The method for making this quilt is very simple - cut up a whole lot of triangles, stitch together in rows, then stitch the rows together until you have a completed quilt top.

I made the bias binding using some more pink fabric that we had used at our wedding to display photos on. I love that some of the fabrics have a bit of history to them from our life pre-baby, and that one day I will get to tell our daughter the stories behind them. To learn how to make bias binding, I followed the instructions on this video - I am very much a visual learner and I am so grateful that there are so many useful videos available online to help me learn new skills for free.

For the quilting, I stitched through the horizontal lines, and the diagonal lines going from left to right across the quilt. I could have kept on going and quilted the diagonal lines from right to left as well, but I was happy with the look and feel of just doing one set of diagonals.

This is the fabric that I used to back the quilt with. I liked the different shades of pink and felt they complimented the varying shades used in the triangles on the front of the quilt. Now all we need is for Baby King to arrive so her quilt can be put to good use.