Baby Quilt Animal Party - part 1

I'm making another baby quilt and for the most part I'm a believer of keeping things easy and simple when it comes to baby quilts. Typically they are used and abused, so I don't feel like spending hundreds of hours of my time making them, but still want to make something to celebrate the birth of a friends' child. Also the quilt is for the child so they should be able to use it while they are growing up instead of it being folded up in some drawer for safe keeping because there was too much work put into it.

I like using panels since usually all it means is sewing on a border and you are ready to quilt. I saw the new line of kids fabrics from Robert Kaufman called Animal Party and really liked the nice bright colours and cute animals on the panel they had. I figured this would be another simple quilt to make until the fabric arrived in the mail.

As you can see from the picture above of the panel print it is based on a wonky log cabin idea. But when I got my panel, not only were the blocks in the panel wonky, the whole panel was wonky. At first I was cursing the fabric shop that I had ordered my fabric from for cutting the panel crooked. So I laid out the panel on the table to see what I could do with it and took a couple of my large cutting rulers to see just how off things were. This is when I actually noticed that the panel was printed crooked in relation to the weave of the fabric and there was no way to cut the panel so it would be on grain. Usually Kaufman fabrics are really of good quality so I'm not sure what happened with this lot.

So I decided to cut out each of the blocks from the panel and add an additional strip of fabric around each block as you would in a wonky log cabin and then square the final block. I had bought some small circle fabric for an inner border and for some reason I bought 1 yard instead on my normal 1/2 yard that I would for an inner border for this type of quilt. Thus I had enough fabric to create proper squared blocks.

I'm now in the process of quilting this. I'm keeping that very simple on this one. I'm doing a grid of 6" squares of straight line quilting in an aqua thread but I'm using a thicker stitch called a saddle stitch to give it a bit more emphasis. Then I'm going to quilt with a mango coloured thread another grid that is 1 1/4" to one side of the aqua grid and finally a third grid of a grass green thread that is about 2" to the other side of the aqua grid.