…All the way to the moon and back!

I think Guess How Much I Love You has to be my favourite children’s book from when my kids were little, it had only just been published then and I loved sitting on their beds, snuggled under a quilt, reading the story to them. I’m going to be a great aunt soon (makes me feel very old, I used to have a Great Aunt Margaret and she seemed positively ancient!!) so of course I’m making a baby quilt. It didn’t take long for me to decide on fabrics as soon as I saw this range. I wanted a fairly neutral palette as we don’t know whether it’s a girl or a boy, so I avoided the pink colourway.

I wanted a very simple pattern which wouldn’t detract from the cute hares on the fabric. I remembered a baby quilt I’d saved on Pinterest and luckily it was a link that actually went back to the original post on Lo, Ray & Me.

The pattern is very straight forward, initially I planned to stitch a wider strip of rectangles and then cut off the 6.5″ strip for the end, but the first fabric I cut I wanted to fussy cut so that idea went out of the window. I do like the two hares in the squares! The only cutting out problem I had was with the spotty fabric going down. The dots aren’t true to the grain along the width, which is how I was cutting it. After much thought I decided to go with the dots and keep my fingers crossed that being slightly off grain wouldn’t matter…

Everything went smoothly until I stitched that dotty length on, I couldn’t get the stripes across to match. Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos at this point, but trust me, it may have only have been a good 1/4″ off but it looked really off! It took me a while to work out that somewhere along the dotty edge some stretching and waving had occurred. I spent a bit of time with my ripper and started that bit again. I decided it was a mixture of two things, the off-grain situation can’t have helped, but also I’ve got into a bit of a bad habit when stitching plain borders on of not measuring the length, just carefully feeding it in and stitching it. I’ve always got away with it, ending up with nice flat borders. I think on the whole I must be fairly even when feeding the top and bottom layers under the foot. Not this time! I then measured my quilt and cut the border strip, pinned them together and stitched. It worked! I think I’ve learnt my lesson!

I thought I had enough batting in my scrap box, but the piece was about 2″ too narrow, so I’ll have to finish it next week. I’m thinking of quilting the word Love or Baby down the dotty strip,maybe with a close stipple behind to make it stand out. I haven’t quite worked the rest out so any ideas welcome!