A quilt for baby

Many months ago, I pinned this tile design as an idea for a quilt. It’s perfectly suited for a quilt – randomly placed squares of all straight lines.

The white kite fabric is a hand-me-down from my sister, who once upon a time used it as a bed canopy for her loft bed in the room we shared. I think she made me promise I would make her something out of it when she has a baby (don’t worry, there’s plenty left).

I’m learning that the part of quilt-making that I actually enjoy is designing and making the quilt top – not so much the quilting process itself. The batting on this quilt is very thick and I was having all sorts of problems quilting the top/batting/back together – the backing kept getting pulled through the machine faster than the top, leading to some unsightly puckering. After a few attempts and a bunch of Googling, I bought a walking foot for my machine, which helps pull the top of a fabric sandwich through the machine. I also bought approximately 300 more quilting safety pins.

The combination of the two (but I think mostly the walking foot) made a big difference, and the rest of the quilting was pretty smooth. I probably should have unpicked one particularly bad quilting line that’s all puckered, but… I didn’t. And I’m okay with that. This quilt is destined for lots of floor+baby time, so I’m not anticipating that it will be pristine for long.