Henry's quilt

Remember when Delaney and I went up to Germany to visit my friend Jayne who was stork-nested up there to have her baby? (Read about that here.) Well, Jayne is back in Turkey with her two cute kids and a darling little baby boy named Henry.

We threw a small shower for her in our church women's group.  From the seven women there she received a star shaped crocheted blanket, a knitted stuffed rabbit, a crochet teddy bear, an embroidered receiving blanket and two handsewn hooded towels. We are a talented bunch!

Anyway, here is my contribution.  A few months ago I showed Jayne three different fabric options for baby boy quilts. She picked Ten Little Things. So using Amy Smart's Off-Set Square Tutorial, I made this quilt:

 All of the prints are from the Ten Little Things line. The solids are Turkish cottons purchased in Adana. They seem to be good quality but I still worry that they won't hold up as well as the prints.

 I love those owls. They are so cute!

For the backing I used everything I had left of the asterisk prints in brown and blue. The middle bit is a Turkish cotton. It seemed to fray easily so I serged it to the other pieces and then put a straight seam just inside the serging.  When my mom came to visit I asked her to bring me some Heat N Bond. She did, but when I went to use it I realized she had brought me the no sew kind. And they aren't kidding. You really can't sew through it very well. So I used a blanket stitch to sew down the applique and then echo stitched around each letter so I could see from the front where to avoid when I was quilting it together.

That wasn't the only bump in the road either. My machine went all wonky on me when I tried to free motion stipple this quilt. After a two days of frustration I finally got it to behave again and was able to finish the quilt without the thread shredding every two inches. Yay!

Jayne loved it and hopefully, as it turned out to be fairly large for a baby quilt, Henry will love it for several more years to come.