Baby Quilt Top Finish

Quilting remains slow here...life has been very busy! But today I got some time to finally finish off this baby quilt top.

I did not use pattern, but instead based my design around the fabric. I browsed a long time on the interwebs through so many adorable baby fabrics, deciding that I wanted something with a panel for  a quick and easy (and cute) quilt. I ended up with the fabric line "Life in the Jungle." The panel pieces are actually for a little fabric alphabet book, but they work fine on a quilt top too.

 Here is the fabric that came in the mail:

 One thing I found really cute about this fabric was the selvedge - check out the little owls!

I also discovered a new use for selvedges - cat toys! Turns out my cat loves anything remotely stringy, so she got a kick out of these leftover fabric scraps. She also liked playing with my little measuring tape.

I wanted the sashing to be spruced up a little, so I made little stars in each corner using the method from the Moose on the Porch Quilts layer cake BOM. Now I looked around a bit on the internet for no-waste methods of flying geese, but couldn't really find any for flying geese on a on a long rectangle like this. So I used the 45˚ method where you sew little squares to the corner and trim half of them off. Now I have a big pile of miniature orange and white triangles that I would really like to use!

I originally bought the orange fabric for the binding and just figured "oh add in a little for the stars," not realizing just how much fabric these flying geese blocks would take! So I suspect I will have to order additional orange fabric to have enough for the binding.

And as you can see in the photo, these guys didn't always turn out square. I amaz myself with how bad I continue to be at sewing straight lines!

Okay in addition to not ordering the right amount of fabric, somehow I completely failed to cut on the grain. Check out how off this piece is in the photo below!

So normally I find the straight grain by ripping a big tear in my fabric, but that is a semi-wasteful method and leaves the edge of the fabric all ripply. So I looked online and tried this method where I folded it in half and wiggled it around until it lay straight, but obviously it didn't work right.

So, how do you find the straight grain in your fabric? I know it's a really basic question, but obviously one I need help answering!


Aaaaand here is the finished top! The kitty was wondering why I was quilting and not giving her attention. :)  I'll be honest, that fancy sashing method added a ton of time to this quilt. I do think it came out looking pretty nice as a result though.  There are some portions of the panel that I wasn't able to use, I am planning on doing flannel on the back so I guess I will just have to save them for some other scrappy project.

I think for the quilting I will go really basic, just stitch-in-the-ditch. I feel like I always get too ambitious with my machine quilting and as a result the finished quilts aren't very fluffy. So on this one, I want to maximize fluffiness! Any tips on that are appreciated too :)

Now, revisiting my countdown-to-move list, which I am going to try to include in each post from now until I move:

1. Charity wholecloth - no progress
2. Quilted Jacket -  no progress
3. Block of the month - no progress
4. Stairway to Cat Heaven #2 - no progress
5. Layer cake bargello - no progress
6. baby quilt - top done!
7. birthday quilt - Okay this is new. I need to make a quilt for my dad's birthday. Not sure how I will fit this in with everything else on this list, but I am excited about working on it and have a pattern chosen.