Slugs and Snails and Puppy-dogs’ Tails

Now that my dear friend Amiee received the quilt I made for her baby boy on his 1st birthday, I can finally show the finished product!

I modified Camille Roskelley’s “Coming Soon” pattern ever so slightly to make this quilt and, as I mentioned in my previous post, my fabric of choice was from the Backyard Baby collection that I adore.  It’s so perfectly boyish!  Anything a little guy would want is in this quilt: bugs, snakes, ant farms, beehives, snails… in other words, all things icky and squirmy.  I hope Caiden will grow to love it.

The backing is silver minky dot fabric and is so yummy that I’m half tempted to make a minky-backed quilt for myself.  Ha!  Since this is a baby quilt and I wanted it to be extra soft and cuddly, I opted not to sew on a binding with square corners.  So, instead of making a full quilt sandwich (quilt top, batting, backing), I quilted just the top with the batting, then to assemble the quilt I simply sewed the quilted top to the minky backing, right sides together, and turned it inside out to finish. I sewed the opening closed and top-stitched all the way around the perimeter, curving around the corners, to secure it.  Voila.

One of the prints has an awesome ant farm, so I free-motion quilted in a boxy, maze-like, all-over pattern (excuse my excessive hyphenation).  The quilting took a little while but was well worth it.

Here it is post-wash.  Oh, the crinkles!  There’s nothing like the finished texture of a quilt with all-over quilting (last hypen, I promise).

I had so much fun with this little guy, from the moment I opened the package with this sweet fabric, to the block assembly, to the basting and the quilting.

Each step in the process brought me much joy, and I’m thrilled to report that Amiee received the quilt with INCREDIBLE gratitude and could clearly feel the love that I put into every stitch.  What a great feeling.  In the words of Borat: “great success!”