Over the last few weeks I’ve been busy making a cot quilt for my new grandson who was born on Wednesday. When I asked re colour schemes and themes a while back mum said she liked neutral colours and maybe some lemon. At the spring quilt show I spotted this quilt kit which was the perfect colour scheme together with gorgeous little ducks and ducklings. It was £40 for the kit which seemed quite a lot but it did include all the precut squares, the border fabric and the binding.

Having made the basic top I realised I could quite nicely include his name on the front of the quilt, having checked first there was no chance of them changing their mind! After trying different fabrics I plumped for the border fabric. I drew the letters by hand and bondawebbed them on, hand-stitched round with dark grey blanket stitch which brought the letters out nicely.

It made up beautifully, here’s the quilt top waiting to be quilted…

I’d given myself sufficient time to make the quilt, until I decided to hand quilt it about three weeks ago!! I made the quilt sandwich with some lovely soft blue for the backing with the words ‘threaded with love’ all over it, I used 505 spray to baste the three layers together, then it was ready to quilt.

I used a variegated grey gutermann thread and started with the name squares. I just went round about 1/4″ in for these.

For the rest of the squares I did a simple cross-hatch which is fairly quick and easy to stitch but effective.

It took me a while to decide how to quilt the border, hearts, lines…I decided in the end to do a meander and to my surprise it’s so much easier to meander by hand rather than on the machine, I think with the slower pace you can plan a bit better. I finished quilting it last night, talk about eleventh hour!

I wasn’t sure about the stripy binding when I first bought the quilt, but it is perfect. The only thing I id have to watch is that I usually stitch my binding strips together on a 45′ angle as it spreads the thicker seam a bit. With stripes there was no way I could match the pattern, so I straight seamed all the joins. machine stitched it to the front and then hand-stitched it to the back.

All I had to do then was to embroider a label. I started this last night and finished it this morning before I went to work after I happened to wake up at 5am!

I gave it to his mum and dad today and they love it 🙂