Baby Clothes Quilt

I recently finished this baby clothes quilt for a fellow expat here in Japan. A mutual friend told her that I make quilts, so she asked if I could make one using her daughter’s baby clothes. I had never made one before, but I was willing to try! So a big box full of baby clothes arrived on my doorstep, ready for my creative touch.

Let me say, the idea of cutting up my own kids’ baby clothes is just too hard to bear, but having to cut up someone else’s?! Yikes! In the end, I was able to use almost all the clothes she sent, including hats and bibs and a fluffy dressing gown. It was definitely a jigsaw puzzle to make it all work, but I loved the challenge and avoided partial seams.

I interfaced almost everything except the fluffy pieces using the lightest interfacing I could find. This was a very good decision! It made it much easier to both square the pieces up and to sew them together. Well, I say “square”, but really, when you’re working with well-loved and washed stretchy and fluffy baby clothes… you have to let go of the desire for perfect squareness!

I added a couple of inches of a light pink solid to frame the quilt out and also so that the end product had a decent chance of being square! The clothing section was very well-basted and then straight-line quilted a 1/4″ish either side of the horizontal seams, and also around the outer edge, before I set loose on the borders. The mum requested her daughter’s name and birth date be included, so I used a Frixion pen to write it out (after doing a test write and iron-off on a scrap of the pink!) and then free-motion quilted in cursive. I love the effect! I was so scared of screwing it up, but it worked beautifully! I then loosely did a vine-cross-feather along each side. It has already been sent off and received and loved by the mum – which is what matters most! And I may even be doing another one for her a little later this year.