Look! I Made a Quilt!

At the beginning of the year I had attempted to share the Pinterest Projects I did each month, buuuuut after three months I gave up. So this post is my attempt at getting back to sharing my Pinterest inspired projects, but instead of it being "look what I did each month" since that hasn't happened since March, this is really "look! I did ONE thing in the last five months!"

But I am super proud of this as it was my first quilt and am really sharing to brag because holy crap, quilts are really tedious and take a long time to make! As I made this quilt for my new nephew I couldn't help but be humbled by all the lovely quilts and blankets Cale and Finn have received. They really are a labors of love and while I did love making this, it also makes me appreciate buying things for people too. Because sometimes that's just as special and twenty million times more practical.

When it came to making this quilt I had a few patterns in mind, and knew that my colors would be the colors my sister-in-law decorated the nursery in: mint, gray and white. I ended up going with this pattern and followed the tutorial (as well as the links she shared), only sized mine for a baby whereas she made two twin blankets. My little bitty baby blanket was even smaller than I had intended and I cannot fathom making something bigger.

I first searched for some graph paper to sketch out my design:

And where did I find this paper you didn't ask? Well, we happened to have some left over from the late 90's when my husband saved all these:

 Yes, those are hand made cheat sheets to whatever video game he was playing at the time. Who knew I'd marry such a hunky nerd??

But back to the quilt. My biggest piece of advice is to just buy the pre-cut squares if you are working with something that involves squares/triangles. Since I was going to make a herringbone pattern, it involved cutting out a bunch of half square triangles, but I had to first cut out a bunch of squares from my gray and white fabric that was placed together:

Then I drew a line down the middle, and stitched 1/4 inch on either side to make my square into two triangles (there is a gray piece of fabric under the white):

Then I cut along the line, and folded the triangles over, ironing them in the process to flatten them out, and cut off the little extra ensuring that each gray/white square was the exact same size:

Then I was finally ready to piece together my quilt which just required turning each square in the appropriate direction to make my pattern:

Then came the sewing - first sewing one square to the next until I had a full row done, then doing the same to the next row, and eventually sewing all the rows together:

After each row was sewn together, I ironed them all nice and flat and laid it all out on the batting and the backing of the quilt that all got pinned together:

Then I sewed along each line in the quilt and 1/4 inch above and below - I wanted it to have a "quilted" look without having to do anything other than sew in a straight line because that is challenging enough! After all the quilting was done, I gave up on doing anything fancy for the binding and instead just took the mint backing and folded it over to the front for binding and I like how there's a little bit of color on the front:

There are some definite (and noticeable) mistakes, especially in the binding. But whatever. It's done and I'm pleased with the end result:

And most importantly, I think Wyatt is too:

................................................................................................