a baby "quilt"

when my son was born, i decided i'd make him a quilt. (for the sake of this project, i'm using the term "quilt" pretty loosely. it's more so a blankie with quilt-like properties.) i'm not much of a quilter, but the final product was actually pretty nice. four years later, he still carries the thing around. his older sister liked it too, so i made her one as well. since i'm having another girl here very soon (uh, like, tomorrow) i figured i'd be a pretty crappy mom if i didn't make her a quilt too.

the latest quilt was made in the same way as the previous two and it's super, super easy. i started out with 7 eighths that i cut into eight rectangles a piece. jo-ann fabrics will sometimes carry "fat eighths" which is exactly the right amount. this go around they didn't have any in the purple color-scheme i was looking for so i bought quarters and cut them in half.

here are my rectangles all cut and ready to be sewn together. (the blue underneath is my older daughter's quilt that i used as a template to make sure i didn't have two of the same print right next to each other.) i find that the 7x8 arrangement makes a nice-sized rectangular blankie.

where i feel my blankie isn't really a quilt is that instead of painstakingly taking the time to sew each rectangle to the set, i sew up the rows of seven so i have eight strips, then i sew the eight strips together to form one large piece of fabric. ta-da!:

for the batting, i used jo-ann fabrics brand traditional batting. i layed the batting out flat, put my rectangle patch on top, and cut the batting to size leaving a bit of a border so that i'd have a nice trim when i attached the backing fabric.

i pinned the rectangle patch to the batting to give myself better control as i layed out the two on top of the backing fabric. (for the backing fabric i used one yard of standard quilting material and just folded up the extra length into the trim.) i then flattened everything out as best as possible and pinned everything together to prepare for the batting stitch.

flipping over the pinned-up blakie, i drew a heart with some plain white bar soap and used that as the pattern for the batting stitch. once there was an actual stitch holding all the pieces together, i was able to fold up the edges of the backing fabric and pin them to form the trim:

after that, it was just a matter of sewing up around the trim to complete the quilt. i used two hems around the edge for security. here are pics of the completed blankie, front and back:

all that's left to do is wash 'er up in some dreft and she'll be ready for my baby girl. seriously, super, super, easy.