So many babies lately! I had two baby quilts I needed to have completed for the beginning of the New Year and thankfully I got both done in time to welcome the babies home. In order to save time I used the same design for both, allowing me to use pieces to mix and match between the two quilts. I chose a simple star pattern that consisted of large squares and triangles and quickly got under way.

This first quilt I made for a good friend of mine but I had no idea if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. They live on the west coast so I deemed an ocean theme appropriate, plus that meant cute ocean creatures! I also had a huge amount of blue and white wave patterned fabric from a previous project that I never used so getting rid of fabric from the stash is a super bonus.

After completing the piecing for the top I hand stitched straight lines throughout, using the geometric shapes as my guide. I’m always looking for ideas for stitch patterns that will save me time on stencilling a design out. Plus this means I don’t have any pencil lines at the end that never seem to want to wash or erase completely out. I love how this came out but didn’t realize how the lines would affect the pattern on the fabric, making it move more into the background. Every time I do a quilt I learn something new!

I decided to add a fun little artistic element to the corners and drew, then stitched, little ocean creatures onto the white squares. It may be a little hard to see but each corner had it’s own little image – whale, starfish, crab, and jellyfish. Happily this seemed to jump out at people right away when they saw the quilt and I really enjoyed trying my hand at freehand drawn stitching.

The second quilt was for my brother and sister-in-law’s new baby and this time I knew it was going to be a girl. Using some of the same cut out pieces from the first quilt, again I was able to dip into my stash to pick out some different patterns and colours for the top piece to make something specific and unique to the new baby. Because I made the second quilt a bit smaller I had to bulk it up with borders to increase the size and really like how the star gets framed.

This time I used flannel for the backing to make it soft but I would say it was a bit of a struggle to hand stitch. I stencilled in pencil some small flowers all over the back so stitched with my 14” hoop from the back. Maybe it was not the best idea to do it from the back or maybe it was because of the two different types of fabric but I felt like it was hard to get the front to stay nice and tight in the hoop, while the back seemed fine. I also struggled a bit with the flower pattern as I think it was a bit small for this project and I spaced them too far apart. For hand stitching I use a wool batting and it is recommended that the spacing between stitches should not be more than 3” or 4”. I did think about adding some stars to fill in the gaps but when getting others’ opinions it seemed they thought just having the flowers was fine. I could have also added some ties in between to fill in the space which would have added a nice texture and dimension to the quilt. Time will tell how this quilt wears.

I really like how these two quilts have their own individual and separate feel even though they were made at the same time, with some of the same fabrics, and using the same large star pattern in the middle.