I decided to use a selection of plains in dark and light shades for the front, with some more of the amazing cat fabric on the back. All of that would be tied together with thin black and white striped binding:

I decide to cut 6 inch squares, and worked out how many I needed of each shade. I love the colours so I did play around with them once I had cut them out, like this:

After I’d finished taking photos, I then laid out the pieces on the floor, playing around with placement a little.

Now for the assembly! I was glad that I took a photo of the placement – to be honest, I would have just got so confused about without it. Although I did sew a couple the wrong way – there’s hardly ever a project I make without any unpicking! I started by sewing the triangles of the same colour together before pressing and trimming the corners. Our duet piano stool came in very handy at this point for keeping the squares in row order!

I then laid each one on the floor again before working out which squares to sew together. At first I (foolishly) went along a line from left to right, which was absolutely fine until I joined two rows together, and the rows had gone out of synch. So that’s where the unpicking came in… I realised that the easiest way was to work in two blocks of 4 squares and a block of 6, which could then be joined together. This is what I did on the first quilt I made, so why I felt the need to switch to a different, untested method I have no idea! At least I know now that my system works for me I pressed the seams at each point of sewing blocks together, so that the whole thing would lay flat.

It took a long time to put the patchwork together, but I was so pleased with how it turned out! Yes, there are a few wonky bits, but you have to look closely to see them I think, and the overall effect is just what I wanted. The next step always makes me a bit nervous once I’m happy with the patchwork – I don’t want to make a mess with the quilting!

To quilt I did what I now know is called quilting ‘in the ditch’, which is basically where you sew along the seams. I just did this on the straight lines (i.e. not the diagonals) using white thread. On the odd occasion the lines weren’t quite matching, so I just had to stop to tie the ends and line it all up again! I’m not sure if you need to use a special foot for this really, but because it wasn’t too thick and I was just sewing straight lines, I just used my normal foot.

Thankfully, other than a few minor slips, I did ok! I only just had enough wadding and backing fabric here, and in one corner the backing had moved up a little whilst sewing, so I’d need to make sure that the binding would cover it. I made my own binding from this super black and white stripes fabric, which contrasts so well with the bright, bold colours. I cut 2 inch strips and then pressed back about half a centimetre on each side. I know I’m mixing up my imperial and metric here, but that’s how I roll! I machine stitched the binding to the front of the quilt and then hand stitched the back – this bit was done with the help of a few episodes of Murder, She Wrote which is a guilty pleasure of mine…don’t judge me!

I must admit that I still don’t really know how to finish off corners…if anyone has any tips, they would be gratefully received! I’m pleased that I managed to make these ones look neat though. And I also made a label to mark the occasion for the bottom corner.

Hopefully Baby will be really happy playing on their mat, with as many friends as can fit on it!

The post More rainbow quilting appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

I’ve been wanting to make a quilt for so long now – I follow so many people on Instagram who are brilliant quilters, and Tom’s Aunt makes amazing ones too so I’m surrounded by inspiration! Our dear friends Luci and Simon are expecting their first baby in just a few weeks, so I decided that I’d have a go at making them a special quilt. They chose not to find out what they are having so I wasn’t sure if they were going for a particular colour scheme – so I decided to go for all the colours!

I had a look around for a basic square quilt tutorial online, but couldn’t really find exactly what I wanted. I guess that this is probably because this is one of the simplest quilts you can ever make, so most people don’t actually need to learn how to do it! There are some beautiful quilt blocks out there, and I loved so many of them but I wanted to make mine with simple squares – partly because I was running out of time to get it done, but also because I had seen the funky zebra and cat fabrics and I wanted to have fairly large squares of them to show off the pattern.

I started by collecting my fabrics and buying a few new quilting materials, so I now have a rotary cutter and a big cutting mat, as well as a handy ruler thingy. I didn’t realise how useful rotary cutters are – this has definitely revolutionised my crafting! In terms of fabrics, I chose a mixture of plain cotton solids and some funky patterns in matching colours. I didn’t want it to be all pattern, so the solids help to break it up a bit. I decided to use 7 x 7″ squares with a 1/2″ seam allowance, in a grid 5 squares across and 6 squares down. After drawing out my plan, I worked out that I needed 3 plain squares in each of the 6 colours, and 2 of each of the patterned fabrics. Then I got cutting!

When all the squares were cut, I laid them all out on our living room floor – this meant that I could work out where to pin them together before stitching.

I stitched the squares together so that I had 3 groups of 4 squares joined together, and 3 groups of 6. Then I joined each of those groups together.

Ta-dah! Once all the fabric was joined together, I cut out a piece of wadding and some red and white stripey cotton fabric the same size for the backing. I pinned it all together using some quilting pins and then started sewing each square.

I decided to sew each square with matching colour thread (which did mean a lot of changing bobbins!) and stitched about 1/2″ inside each seam. At first I was worried that the squares were a bit poofy, but the more I stitched the better it seemed – and it needs to be comfy for baby! I was also a bit bothered about the fact that my squares on the back didn’t line up with the lines of the fabric, but this also looked better the more I went on.

The final stage is to sew on the binding. I was going to make it myself, but bought some in the end because I was running out of time to finish my quilt! This was a bit tricky and I should probably look up a better way to do it (any suggestions would be gratefully received!). I stitched on the machine but finished a few bits off by hand.

I added a final final touch with this label, which I wrote with a permanent quilting marker pen. I just used some plain white cotton for this, and pressed the edges behind before hand stitching on with some blue cotton to match the binding.

I’m really pleased with how my first quilt has turned out! I’ve learnt a lot from doing it (mainly realising what I need to look into a bit more) and am looking forward to making my next one! Hope you’ve all had a super weekend

The post Rainbow patchwork baby quilt appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.