Today I'm happy to share with you the bright quilt I made for my newest nephew. Now at the time I picked out fabric I didn't know if I was getting a niece or nephew, and my sister-in-law just asked for bright colors. This wasn't what I intended on getting when I left for the fabric store, but if you know me it's not a big surprise I came home with something completely different, LOL. I picked out some bright colors with a pop of animal print to coordinate with the zoo animals on the backing fabric.
I used the Disappearing Nine Patch pattern for the top. It's an easy pattern I found a while back on one of my favorite sewing blogs, Cluck Cluck Sew. The gist of the pattern is to make a basic nine patch out of 5-inch squares, then cut the nine patch into fourths, and piece the resulting blocks together to make the quilt top.
For this quilt I made five nine patches. Then I cut into fourths for the "disappearing" effect and stitched together four across and five down. I also added a solid border with orange circles fabric around the finished nine patches and then a border of rectangles outside that. Next up was to make a nice "quilt sandwich" with the top, batting, and bottom in preparation to quilt everything together. It's hard to tell in the pictures, but I used orange thread to quilt inside and outside the border of each nine patch and the border pieces.
Then I grabbed my bias tape maker to make my own bias out of the orange circles fabric to give a nice coordinating finished look for the binding. If you've never made your own bias, all it takes is a bias tape maker (about $5), your fabric, and an iron. I also like to use a starch spray (Mary Ellen's Best Press is my favorite) for a better result after ironing. Then you have a bias tape that perfectly matches your quilt -- yay!!
My nephew is four months old now and already has gotten lots of use out of his blanket. I hear he loves it for tummy time and playing, and also loves looking at the bright colors!!
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