Baby Clothes Quilt

A friend of mine adopted a little boy from Guatemala; her son is the same age as James. She wanted to do something special with his baby clothes and asked me if I could give her some pointers on making a baby clothes quilt. I told her that as she had limited sewing experience to just send the clothes to me and that I'd put them together for her. So started a UFQ that I admit taunted me every time I looked at it. You see, clothing isn't the same as working with quilt fabric, and it's stretchy.Instead of stabilizing the shirts I then sewed them to another stretchy fabric (the dots) and basically, it was just a huge pain to get the top together because nothing would lie flat, and I couldn't iron the dotted fabric or else the dots would press out. I finally got the top together, basted it, and tried to quilt it. 

That was funny. Or at least my machine thought so. I swear I heard it laugh at me. I was trying to just stitch in the ditch on the squares and it didn't work out very well. The back didn't feed at the same rate as the front and it was basically a mess. So I gave up for a while. And when I say a while, it was about 3 years before I got back to working on it. You see, my Elna Supermatic is a great machine, but it doesn't free motion quilt, so I needed to wait until I finished the quilt that was up on the frame at my mom's house then I could put this one up and get it done. I still haven't finished that quilt, but my mom ended up taking the frame down and at the same time my machine was misbehaving, so I ended up borrowing her Pfaff Grand Quilter and I FINALLY got this baby quilted. It still had some drag and it's not the prettiest, but at least it's done and off to its rightful owners. It will be a long time before I attempt another one of those suckers...

Conner's Baby Clothes Quilt - Finished: December, 2013.