I have found that with my love of sewing I have also found a love of buying fabric. Those darling baby flannels get me every time and after a while I had too much and needed to find a project to use them on. I just have a regular sewing machine and this project was so fun to do some quilting my self and give my baby quilts a fun extra element. So I made one boy one and one girl one using fun animal flannels. With the quilting as you go it does sashing around each square so you don't have to worry too much about it matching.
For my baby quilts I decided to go with 9 inch squares for the flannel print and batting and 11 inch squares that are the back and sashing around each square. A little hint to get your fabrics really flat is to use starch, it also makes them a little less flimsy to work with. It also helps to just iron your batting, so it is nice and flat for sandwiching your pieces together.
Then I used an all purpose adhesive spray from Walmart and attached the batting to the back and then the front onto the batting. I had never used a spray before and I am so glad I tried it! It was so much faster and more effective when I was sewing to hold it all together then pins. Be warned that the spray some how gets way further then you think it will, I had to scrub my table a little afterwards.
Next I used tape to give me straight lines to follow for quilting the design into each square. I tried to get creative and use lots of different stripes, boxes, and diagonal lines to make it fun and different and it turned out soo cute!
Then my favorite part, quilting!! I had so much fun sewing in designs and went through soo much thread! The only real tip for this part is to sew your design all from one side to the other if possible. For example if you are doing horizontal lines, always start each line on the right side and sew to the left or else you might get some weird puckering in between your designs.
Once I had all the squares quilted I laid out my quilts in the place and order that I was happy with and then I sewed together the rows. You take two squares that you want to put next to each other, you put them back to back and line them up based on your front smaller squares and then sew right along the edge of that smaller square. I recommend sewing a little before and a little after that little square so you don't end up with little holes in your quilt in the end.
That should connect your square's and I just did that for the whole row and then I did the sashing and I used this video to figure that part out https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=44xZ4PswurE . I am a firm believer in using starch when ever there is folding in a project.
Once I had the sashing done in between where the squares were sewn on each row I then used the same method as sewing two squares together to sew two rows together. It was a little trickier and they didn't always line up perfectly, but luckily you can hide most mistakes with the sashing. Once you get the rest of the sashing done once all your rows are sewed together your quilt should be looking fantastic!
I did pull out a needle and thread and did a little touch up on some spots. For example the spots where four corners came together was sticking out a little so I stitched it up to lay flat.
So it started out like this...
Here is what the stitching looked like...
And here is how it looks afterwards...
So not a huge difference but something that I wanted to fix. I also did the same thing on the back side of the quilt if there were little wholes.
Over all this was a super fun baby quilt and I love that I quilted it myself! They turned out way cute and I will definitely be using this quilt as you go technique again!
I just love how the back turned out!
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