Blue Coins for Baby

This went together with a very satisfying quickness -- not error-free, mind you, but well in time for the gift-giving next week.  The colors are very pleasing to my eye. 

I still have my old 1980s Kenmore sewing machine, which doesn't extend to anything so grand as a walking foot, so the quilting is only widely-spaced straight lines down the "stacks", but the wideness gives the quilt a pleasing fluffiness, I think.

I wasn't very impressed with my ability to cut a straight edge -- my tendency to try to be frugal and not waste any fabric tipped over the edge into skimping, and the backing fabric actually came up short on one side, so that I had to trim off a bit more than I really wanted to, which led to a series of snips here and there that seemed to make things worse, not unlike trying to cut your three-year-old's hair, snipping a bit here which makes that bit crooked which necessitates another snip there, &c. &c. &c.  And in another instance, although I was taught by my mother and grandmother to always, always, cut off the selvages, I have begun to absorb the much-earlier practice of using as much of the fabric as possible -- maybe selvages don't pucker as much as they used to in Grandma's day, I wonder to myself, I've usually been all right -- I thought I had measured carefully enough that these would be just inside the seam allowances, but one slipped somehow, so that my shame is there for all to see.

I thought, rather desperately in a dark moment at the end of a long day of making edging strips and laboriously pinning and re-pinning and hand-sewing the first long edge and a corner, that I have enough fabric left to make another quilt, I could use this one for day-camp and make another one, with straighter edges and no parsimonious white selvages, one that I wouldn't have to make excuses for -- "sorry about that wobbly bit there."

And then when I woke up the next morning, I knew that this isn't mean to be a showpiece or a prize-winner, it's meant to be used, for the baby to nap on, or the new mom to nap under, to take to the park on a sunny day and not mind if it gets dirty or spat-up on.  It's okay.

And I really do love the colors, the different shades of indigo and brown, the little flecks of lighter shades here and there that give it both a liveliness and a kind of serenity.

I had thought of piecing a quirky back, but this is just plain, a big piece of Linen Look, the sturdiness of which I have been very happy with in other projects, and comes already wide enough to need only a single cut.  The edging is a lovely coffee-brown Kona Cotton.

So there wasn't really much "process" involved here, and it does look a bit more "homemade" than I quite wanted it to, but there it is -- I will embrace its imperfections along with its beauties --

Comments

[Dawn in NL]

Very nice. I'm sure mother and baby will be delighted and awed at your work. I can't quite see how you have the time with all the other activities you write about not to mention family!

[ceci]

Looking "home made" is perfect for a baby quilt; I think the boro context of mending and making do almost requires that it be a quilt to go down on the grass in the park or the sand at the beach! At least that will be my story with my ongoing boro pattern fabric baby quilt. Which also includes a few selvage glimpses.

Thank you for sharing your lovely finished product.

ceci