A Baby-Sized Game Night Quilt

It’s May 2025, so what better time to share another finish from late last year?? This really is my last finish from 2024, so hopefully I can keep my blog posts a little more timely for the rest of 2025. Ha!

I made my original Game Night quilt in late 2021, and released the pattern the following spring. To accompany the pattern release, I made a quilt top in the baby size using four fabrics from my Alison Glass stash. I really liked this top, and how different it looked with the black background vs. the gray I used in my original throw size version!

Alas, as with quite a few of my makes over the last few years, this quilt top sat unfinished for months…until I finally pulled it off the shelf last November! (And then the finished quilt sat until this week when I got around to taking a finished photo.)

I don’t have an end destination for this quilt, so I used it as an opportunity to experiment. I chose a pantograph with a decent amount of backtracking that would need to be aligned fairly precisely from row to row to look good. Moon Phases (by Mistletoe Quilting Co) complemented the circles and half circles in the piecing nicely, and I really love the look — I’m sure I’ll use this panto again at some point.

The alignment was a little tricky, but no worse than I’ve done in the past for dense straight line quilting. In fact, I think I’m really benefitting now from the fact that straight line quilting has been part of my longarm journey from the very beginning. I learned many of the tips and tricks for maintaining alignment early on, and that attention to detail pays off with precise pantographs too.

I also decided to use Aurifil monofilament in my longarm for the first time. My dealer raves about how well this thread performs on her own Millie, so I felt reasonably confident that I would have success too — and happily that was the case! I had seen recommendations to loosen the top tension with monofilament, so I did that and didn’t have any issues. (I’ve since used the monofilament twice more. It’s a great option for some quilts.)

Finally, since I actually had two low-stakes quilt tops to work on, I decided to try loading both of them onto the frame at the same time! I’ve seen other people use this time-saving technique for smaller quilts, and while I’m glad I tried it and had success, I do think I prefer to do one quilt at a time from now on — trying to manage rolling back and forth between two quilts at the same time was kind of annoying.

(If I did more custom quilting, where I could quilt both pieces before advancing the whole sandwich, that would be easier.)

All that said, it was really fun to be able to try out several new-to-me things, and happily the result is a lovely baby quilt.

The stats:

• Pattern: Game Night by me!
• Quilt measures 36″ x 36″.
• Top and binding fabrics are all by Alison Glass for Andover Fabrics.
• Backing is Chalk & Charcoal by Jennifer Sampou for Robert Kaufman.
• Pieced with Aurifil 50 wt thread.
• Quilting on my APQS Millie with Aurifil monofilament thread on top and Glide in the bobbin.
• Pantograph is Moon Phases by Mistletoe Quilting Co.