Fabric Stash Project: Southern Fabric Rainbow Baby Quilt

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This quilt pattern has been stuck in my head since Southern Fabric Blog posted it 5 months ago.  I really love the way it looks – simple, clean, colorful and happy.

I have forced myself into a fabric buying hiatus in order to work through my fabric stash. It can be difficult and is very un-inspiring, but the Rainbow Baby Quilt was inspirating. A family baby shower invitation also provided some inspiration. My first pass looking for colors forced me to sort and straighten up the fabric stash as I picked out and cut out colored squares (slightly inspiring touching and thinking about my collection, as any crafter knows). I wasn’t sure my stash would hold rainbow-y enough colors. I cut up an old sheet from my mother-in-law for all of white.

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After I thought I had all of the squares cut, my older daughter agreed to help me.

It was great fun for me to share this with her and we seemed to get a ton done. We sewed, cut and ironed. But I didn’t stress the care and precision needed in quilt squares enough, and I ended up ripping out, re-ironing, re-sewing and trimming every square later. Un-inspiring. I put the project away for a few weeks, when I got it out again to piece together, I found out that I’d somehow only made about 2/3rds of the necessary squares. Un-inspiring. I put it away for another couple weeks and again wasn’t entirely fulfilled by my stash selection of colors when I got it back out. Finally, with the  shower date approaching, I pulled it out one last time and buckled down.

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And in the end I was really very happy with the finished product (and that I had big enough backing fabric and batting in my stash!) It’s pretty, no? I kind of want to make another.

This really is a great beginner quilt pattern, and does go together quickly and easily (once inspired). It’s also small enough to easily machine quilt on a standard machine. I machine quilted in the ditch in straight white lines following the white triangle path (horizontal, vertical and on one diagonal), which went very quickly and easily.

I originally was going to use the backing material for binding due to stash limitations, but went with piecing oranges together and think that was a good choice. I machine bound it. I’m not very good at machine binding, but did pretty well this time.

I used the quilt (and the leftover length of the binding) to wrap up the rest of the shower gift (something from the registry), and a family favorite board book as directed in the invitation for the card, and mailed it off to the shower.

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Thank you Southern Fabric Blog (of which I am only a fan and have no other affiliation) for the inspiration!

 

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