The Quilt

Yay! Sadie's memory quilt is finally finished!
This was the inspiration: from Martha Stewart Baby:

First came the cutting. My version is made of 130 4x4" squares of fabric from favorite baby clothes. I was shooting for a 12 square by 15 square quilt, but ran out of fabric and oomph at 10x13, which coincidentally is my birthday :) Then, some obsessive placing and positioning.

I was going for a watercolor effect, with a gradation of bright colors from upper left corner down to lower right. I don't know that anyone else will notice, but at least it gave me some direction!

I got it all pieced together last August, but I wanted the perfect piece of matelasse for the back. That took the better part of a year to find. Thanks fabric.com for finally getting some in stock! It isn't perfectly white, but that's ok.

I did find a wonderful raspberry crochet yarn to tie the quilt together, but could never find the right color binding. Finally, I just made my own:
I even did the nifty continuous binding strip trick, by cutting a square into a parallelagram and sewing it into a tube, then you cut along your measured line, and you have a continuous strip of fabric! And since my nifty bias tape maker is for 1/2" SINGLE fold, I had to use another trick for making 1/2" double fold as seen here: Gotta love sewing blogs for all these neat tricks. It isn't really true quilt binding, but sewn in between the quilt top and backing like large piping.

This is the finished product:

(Ugh--why is it such a pain to load pictures onto Blogger? I must be doing something wrong. And why did it turn all my pictures around?

It was fun to do, and turned out pretty much like I wanted it to. Sadie seems to like it: she tried to go "nigh-nigh" while I was ironing it!