A New Quilt for My Grandson

My grandson turned two in August. For his birthday, we bought him a big boy bed. The time has come to move out of the crib and have a real bed. Besides, in a month (b’shaa tova) my kids are expecting a new baby and they’ll need the crib for her.

With a new bed, comes a new quilt. A while back, I bought a kit on Craftsy.com. I have a rule about buying quilting kits – I look at the amount of fabric and if the per yard price that is in the kit makes sense, I am willing to buy it. The kit was on sale when I bought it and came out to about $5.50/yard, so I went for it.

The pattern looked simple enough, but I didn’t take into account how much work it was going to be using directional fabric. All the foxes and anchors have a definite direction. I had to be very careful cutting out the half square triangles that went around the foxes and to make sure that the squares for the paper piecing always faced the right direction. It took a lot more brain work than you would expect.

I actually finished the quilt top a few months ago. It took me a long time to figure out how to quilt it.

It’s a kids quilt, so I don’t know how well it will be treated. A lot of people that quilt will do an all-over design for kids. It’s really hard for me to do that, so I didn’t. I didn’t want the foxes to get lost by quilting over them, so I decided to outline them. I’m a bit lazy when it comes to changing thread color, so I used white. My daughter said that she found it cool – it makes the foxes look like little cut outs. Yeah – that’s what I was going for…

Whenever I see little squares, I almost always use a continuous curve design. For the background arrows, I used a meander design. The meander makes me think of the chains that anchors are on. The frame around the foxes was too bland, so I added straight lines to box them in to give them more definition.

I had a lot of different ideas of what to do with the star blocks. In the end, I wanted to make it look more like a mariners compass, so I used a ruler and went with a nice dot-to-dot quilting design.

I’m quite pleased with the way it came out. My daughter-in-law tells me that my grandson looks for his quilt when he wants to go to sleep. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it made me happy to hear.

Now that this quilt is done, I need to figure out what I’m going to do for his sister! I have some ideas. I better get cracking – I only have a month left!