Baby Quilt with a Gathered Border

When there is a new baby in the house, or on the way, we crafters get so inspired. This photo is of my first granddaughter, Alyssa, when she was just a few weeks old. One of my projects was to crochet this little blue dress for her. Yes, I understand that traditionally blue is for the little boys - but her father thought she would look pretty in blue. And of course she does.


The body of her baby quilt was made simply. I cut 8 inch squares of two fabrics. One was a mottle blue and one was a cherub fabric. Then I put it together with sashing strips.

What made this little quilt really special was the gathered border, made from another cherub fabric. To simplify the process of adding the border, I first rounded the corners of the quilt top. I did this by laying a plate face down on the top. I lined it up with the sides of the quilt, and then traced the curve of the plate at each corner.


In order to add this gathered border, I cut a 4 1/2" strip that was twice the measurement of the quilt edge. I then put a basting thread 1/4" in from each edge of the strip. I gathered one edge, pinning it (right side to right side) to the quilt edge in a 2:1 ratio. I then gathered the outside edge, being careful that the gathers would correspond to the first set of gathers. That was the trickiest part of the whole process.

Quick and Easy Projects

Here we have an example of a quilt that is easy and quick to make. I cut 12 inch squares of two different fabrics and alternated them. One was a Christmas print, with various Christmas scenes. The other was a coordinating print that reminded me of stained glass.

To fancy it up a bit I separated these squares with black borders, adding joining stars of various yellow fabrics.

This quilt was made for a Christmas Craft Sale at my church. And yes, that is yours truly standing to the right of the quilt. I do NOT have tattooed arms though! There is just some damage on the photo.

Cover Me with Love

This is a very special quilt, made for a very special girl. One year when I was teaching first grade, Alma (one of my students) was with her father out in front of the school when he had a massive heart attack and died instantly. He was not even thirty years old.

Quilters in the Guardian Angles Swap contributed the squares in this quilt, and I put it together for Alma. I told her that there were a lot of people who really cared about her and her family, and what had happened to her father.

Alma is the little girl in the white T-shirt. Her cousin Johnny is sitting on her right. I took the squares to class as they arrived, and we would lay them out on the floor. Alma herself decided how the squares were to be arranged.

The smile on Alma's face says a lot about how healing a quilt can be in a time of grief.

My husband Tom is on the right. Myrna, the woman on the left, taught in the room next to mine. We were both teaching bilingual first grade in Irving, Texas, at the time.

It was so good to have such a physical way of providing comfort to Alma.

A Treasured Scrap Quilt

Doesn't seem quite right to call this a Scrap Quilt, but it was made entirely with squares left over from other projects. The majority of them were left from a quilt made for my sister Peg,

I also incorporated some fish squares I had accumulated in a swap, and one of the VERY few squares I have appliqued: the octopus you will find in the lower central portion of the quilt.

My daughter Jennifer is on the right. She is the owner of this quilt.

A Charm Quilt for Christmas

This is another example of a charm quilt. This one was made for my good friend Martha Cooper, and was a Christmas present.

The cool thing about charm quilts is that they have that homey quality we associate with quilts, and are a relatively simple quilt to make. They are great quilts for beginners.

Strip-pieced Watercolor Quilting

This lovely quilt was a graduation present for my niece, Sally Marie Beglau. She is on the right, her father Bob is in the background, and her younger sister Katy is on the left.

This quilt was my first experiment with strip-pieced watercolor quilting. I purchased no additional fabric for the front side of this quilt. (Though I must admit I purchased a fancy music print for the back side ;-) It was made entirely from strips I had saved as I collected fabrics for my watercolor stash.

The Making of a Watercolor Quilt

Here's another picture of that watercolor quilt, along with more details of its construction.


I purchased, swapped, and cut fabric for nine months before beginning the project. I constructed it in sixteen sections which were quilted individually. Then I put the sixteen sections together using a binding, which I hand stitched down on the back side.


I applied a skirt around three sides of the quilted top, at my mother's request. I doubled the fabric for the skirt, and gathered it. I applied it to the backside of the quilt, incorporating a binding into the seam. Then I folded the binding back over to the right side and stitched it down by hand. This resulted in a "piping" which was another detail my mom had requested.


This queen size quilt is reversible; I used a lovely batik with a fern pattern on the back side. I am also made my mother pillow shams, and a ruffle for her window valance, in the same fabric as the skirt.



Here is a picture of the quilt in its design stages. My husband put up a design wall at the end of my sewing room by screwing ceiling tiles into the wall. I then covered the wall with pink flannel. I purchased "quilt and fuse" grid, which I cut into squares that were 11 x 13 small two inch squares. It took a total of 2,288 two inch squares of fabric to finish the design.

In addition to being a watercolor quilt, it became a memory quilt. Among the 2,288 squares are 20 - 30 which are in the quilt specifically because they conjure up various memories. Most of the memories just came up as I worked with the various fabrics.

However, there were two squares which I really wanted to include and was able to do so because of the sharing nature of participants in a watercolor email list I participated in at the time. The two special squares were of a moose & a tuba.

Here is a picture that reveals some of the detail of the quilt.... an example of the way I fit special squares into it. Can you find the moose? When my brothers were teenagers, "moose" is the nickname they used for my mom for several years. Thanks to the helpful quilters on the watercolor list at quiltropolis.com, I was actually able to find a moose to call up this memory for my mom.


This quilt now rests on the bed of my granddaughter Alyssa - so it truly has become an inter-generational quilt.