Baby quilt process

I made this baby quilt on a deadline.

Baby quilt, 40.5 x 40.5 inches.

Digging through my stash I found a cute fat quarter of animals in race cars and pulled fabrics in orange, yellow, green and blue to go with it.

I decided to cut strips of racing animals and fill around them with rectangles of other fabric. The fat quarter happened to have the selvage on it, and it is "Go Mice Go" by Jennifer Sampou for Robert Kaufman Co.

Once everything was arranged on the design wall to my liking, I sewed the pieces together in rows and then the rows together.

I read on a blog somewhere about using the specialty stitches on your machine for quilting, and I tried it with this quilt. It took maybe five minutes of tinkering with the settings of the zigzag stitch to get a look I liked.

 These poor mice and goats are traveling a bumpy road!

Nothing in my stash worked for the backing, but I found the perfect thing at the quilt shop.

I had just enough of the backing fabric to make the binding too. And, I mean just enough. There are two small pieces 2 1/2 inches by about 3 inches left over!

Equal parts sewing and unsewing

I think I may have sewn this top twice. I took it apart early on to change the fabric behind the eyes. And there was more unsewing when I decided that the stripes in the background fabric should all go in the same direction so it looks like the arcs are appliqued on one large piece of fabric. 

I had to spread the top out on the floor and shoot it from the stairs to get the whole thing in the frame. 

These last few weeks have also involved a fair bit of unsewing on the borders. I had a limited amount of the fabric I wanted to use for the border, and the only way I could make it work resulted in bias along the edge where the border strips would be added. I starched the fabric, I was careful, and still the quilt waved enthusiastically at me! I ended up adding the border strips and then redoing the applique along the edge to fix the puffiness. There is still a bit of that, but I'm hopeful it will quilt out.

When adding the border strips, I measured the quilt width at the top, middle and bottom; averaged those totals; cut the strips to that size; marked the top and strips at the quarter points; matched those points; and eased the fabric to fit the border to the top. Then I did the same for the other sides. This really helped square things up.

  

A view of the top back.

 I still need to make binding and a backing, but I have the fabric for both. I think this is one for the long armer. I'm not sure how to quilt it, and it's so large I'm a bit intimidated to do it myself. Can't find the piece of paper where I calculated the borders, but I think the top ended up at 82 inches square.