A Baby Quilt

One of my best friends is having a baby girl in a couple months so I decided to test my sewing skills and make a baby quilt. I really love the look of stacked coin quilts I've found on the web. The design seemed comparably simple to other quilt designs, just a bunch of straight lines so I thought it might be doable. I picked out fabric from Joann's in pink, lavender, a light teal blue, and a bright green. Here's a sneak peak of the finished product:

To get started I washed all the fabric and then cut the fabric into 2.5 inch strips and sewed them together along the long edge. I initially sewed four strips together of each color then cut the width of the strips to 6 inches wide. These pieces I randomly mixed until I had segments in the length I wanted. I wasn't too worried about everything being perfectly uniformed, I wanted it to have a little character and being a new sewer my seams weren't always straight!

And then I ironed the seams open before moving on:

Next I cut white fabric in 6 inch widths to the same length of my colored fabric segments. I had three colored fabric segments so I cut 4 pieces of the white fabric to go the length of the quilt (along the long edges and between the colored segments) and also 2 pieces to go across the top and bottom of the quilt. I sewed all these pieces together and then ironed the seams open.

Then I placed the quilt front on top of the quilt backing fabric with a cotton batting in between. I chose a ice cream fabric in similar colors to my strips as my friend is a sugar-a-holic :o) I decided to use cotton batting as I've read that cotton will give the appearance of an old fashioned quilt (sort of dimply) after washing in comparison to a synthetic batting. (In the picture my edge fabric was 8 inches but I cut it down to 6 inches to fit the batting.)

I then pinned all the layers together so they would not shift during the quilting step.

I wasn't ready to try my hand at free-form quilting to make the neat swirly pattern so I decided to do rectangles in the white segments of the quilt. To make it even easier I made the stitch a sewing foot distance from the colored strips instead of trying to match the seam perfectly.

The next step I was a bit worried about because I couldn't quite picture how to do the hand stitch for the back of the quilt binding. I decided I would give it a try since it would give the quilt a nice finished look. I followed the tutorial on Crazy Mom Quilts and I figured it out with her detailed directions! First I sewed the length of the binding strip I would need from a pink pin dot fabric in 2.5 inches wide. I then ironed the binding strip in half. Then I pinned it around the edge of the front side of the quilt with the open edge of the binding towards the edge of the quilt. Next I sewed it into place, 1/4 inch in from the edge of the binding strip.

And used pinking shears to cut off the excess quilt fabric:

I then flipped the binding around to the back side of the quilt and began the hand stitching:

It took me a little while, but once I got the hang of it I was moving right along. The corners were a bit hard to do, but after the first two I figured it out. Here's a front side corner: