The is the second in a series of quick and easy baby quilts I’m making for several people in my life who have had babies recently, and came together almost as fast as the Sea Geese quilt. The design was 100% inspired by this Instagram post — I loved the single oversized block and thought it would look great as a baby quilt too. I bought the Swoon Quilt pattern, but then ended up making a few changes to the way it’s constructed to make the piecing even simpler. I also had to redo the math since the pattern makes 24″ blocks and I wanted something larger. My version is 36″ square.
The fabric is all from Hawthorne Threads’s “Celestial” collection. It’s digitally printed, which made for a few interesting observations. First was that while I ordered specific amounts of each fabric, it all came printed on a single long piece of yardage! It hadn’t occurred to me that with digital printing, they can literally print fabric on demand, so I thought that was pretty cool. They warn that the fabric feels crisp when it arrives, and it really does. I prewashed before sewing and then washed the finished quilt again and while it softened up a little, this fabric does have a stiffer and slightly more rough texture than I’m used to. To be honest, I don’t love the feel of it compared to other quilting cotton…but I don’t hate it either. It’s just different.
This one is backed and bound with minky. I made the SUPER DUPER boneheaded mistake of cutting right along the edge of the quilt top when I had intended to cut with a 1″ border, so I couldn’t do a self-binding technique like on my Sea Geese quilt. Argh!! I was so annoyed with myself when I realized what I’d done. I had to suck it up and bind the quilt in the traditional way, which took longer and was more challenging with minky, but in the end I managed to make it work. I even hand stitched the binding to the back to make it look nicer. Hand stitching is really rare for me, so I hope it holds up.
I mailed this one away last week to a new baby girl. Her dad is an old coworker at NASA who moved out to west Texas a couple years ago with his now-wife — who works at the McDonald Observatory. They found the starry theme highly appropriate!
p.s. There’s a big ol’ stray thread in the first two pictures that I didn’t spot until I was writing this post and the quilt was already in the mail! Ah well.
What a great baby quilt that was obviously custom made for the recipients. Bummer about trimming the quilt and having to sort out binding with the minky and not just folding it over from the back. It looks like it turned out very well, though. Congratulations on another great finish!
I know what you mean about the feel of the fabric from Hawthorne Threads, but I found working with it that it doesn’t fray very badly and presses really well.
I agree on that — the crispness of the fabric was great for the things you mentioned!