Week 7: Baby Quilt for Baby Josie

I found out my good friend Ann just had her baby today; a little girl named Josephina who they plan to call Josie.  She was the one that I made the baby headbands for in my Week 5 craft.  Ann wanted to wait to have her baby shower with some friends until after the baby is born so we can all get together and meet her,  and even thought it's a few weeks out I wanted to get the baby quilt made for Josie so I wasn't scrambling at the last minute like usual.  

Initially I wanted to make Josie's quilt match her room decor, but I saw that someone had purchased a bedding set for her from Ann's registry that included a quilt.  So my next thought was to make a quilt that the baby could use in other places or play on that in no way would match her bedroom.   The quilt ends up measuring 42" by 42".

I made each of my twin baby nieces a quilt for Christmas and started making my other niece a quilt, so by this time around I barely needed to reference the tutorial I relied on so much with the other quilts, found at http://www.diaryofaquilter.com/p/beginning-quilting-series.html.  Here are pictures of the two quilts I made for the twins:

To begin the quilt for Josie, I started by looking through fabric at the fabric store and finding the large flowered print for the backing of the quilt and tried to find some fabrics in coordinating colors to go with it.  I struggled a bit because the colors are not as common, but here is what I came up with:

Instead of buying only fabrics for the squares I bought 10 since I couldn't decide on which fabrics I wanted to use.  When I laid all fabrics out after I cut the squares, it looked just a little too orange:

I figured all those orange squares coupled with an orange border was a little too much so I swapped out some of the orange squares with the spare dark pink flowered fabric I bought.  The result seemed to balance out the quilt a little more.

I pieced all the squares together and sewed the border around the squares.  I then stitched diagonally through all the squares to attach the top to the batting and backing.  Once I got the binding stitched on I was finished! All in all it took me only 2 days to cut, piece, and sew the quilt together.   

Here are some pictures of the finished quilt for baby Josie. The lighting is not the best but I was pretty happy with how it turned out and I am hoping Ann will like it too! 

Until next week! 

Rachel