Navy & White Baby Quilt

A friend of mine and her husband were expecting a child, so I offered to make them a baby quilt. I've been in a bit of a sewing slump with clothes and I thought a quilting project might be exactly what I needed.

My friend has very classic taste, so I decided on a traditional quilt pattern - log cabin. Her nursery colors are navy and white, so I found fabrics that were either navy on white or white on navy prints - along with a really cute elephant print fabric to match a picture she has on the wall.

I planned out the order of the "logs" and then made a test square to see how it all turned out.

I love the way the seams on the back of these blocks look once they're all pressed outwards.

With a successful example block done, I set about cutting the many, many strips required to make the full 16 blocks needed for the quilt. (Each block consists of a central "brick" and then 16 strips from 8 different fabrics.)

I built the remaining 15 blocks in parallel - adding a row to all blocks, ironing and trimming them, and then adding the next row on.

With all of the blocks assembled, I trialed a few different possible layouts for the quilt. The fun of log cabin is that how you orient the blocks can result in radically different overall patterns.

Originally, I thought I would go with layout #1 - but once I saw them laid out, I preferred layout #3.

I don't have the space, skill, or equipment to (nicely) quilt a quilt this size (it finished at around ~50 inches square), so I sent it away to be quilted. When it came back, I bound it with strips of fabrics leftover from the front.

The back is a soft and snuggly fabric with parent and child animals on it.

I think it came out really cute and, even better, it seems like the new parents did too!