Rag Quilt

Being far away from friends is hard. Being far away from friends when they are about ready to have a baby is even harder! To let my friend know that I was thinking of her I made this quilt for her.



First off pick out three or more pieces of fabric that you want to have in your blanket. I chose two different green pattern, black with a swirl in it, and a fuzzy white. You can have the back of the quilt be the same pattern by getting double of the fabric or you can do a solid color (which I did). I just went with Black as the back of the blanket. You can also choose any type of fabric. The 3 three (greens and black) were just your regular cotton. But it depends on how warm or heavy you want as to which fabric to choose.

Now for the yardage....
I'm pretty sure that I bought 1/4 of a yard of each color and for the back I bough 2 yards.
I also bought a baby quilt batting for the center of the quilt.

First thing first cut out the fabric into squares. My squares were 7 inches.




Next you need to cut the batting out. I made the mistake of cutting the squares an inch smaller... which didn't work. I then had to re-cut all of them another inch smaller. So my batting was 5 inch squares.



About this time you will also want to be laying out the blanket in the pattern that you think you will want to have the final to look like. This will give you a good idea of how many more squares to cut or if you need more or less of a fabric.

The blanket that I made was 7 squares wide and 7 squares long. Depending on who you are making the blanket for you can go bigger or smaller. Also make sure to cut out the squares for the back of you blanket.



Now the fun part. You will want to piece and sew each square together. So get a back fabric, the batting and the front fabric and make a batting sandwich. I have to pin everything, I'm just not good enough yet to sew without pins.



Then you'll sew an X in each individual square.



Once all my squares were sewn together I started sewing them into rows to form my blanket. To get the fringe on top the best that I found was to put the two back pieces together and sew on the front. I hope this picture shows what I mean:



I found it best to sew each row individually. So when I was done with this step I had 7 rows of squares. This especially helped because when I layed it out I had flipped the pattern and had two matching fabrics right next to each other. If I had sewn them together without laying them down to see a final time, I would have had to un-stitch that portion of the blanket. Glad I dodged that bullet :).



Then you'll sew the rows together the same way you sewed the squares to each other. The nice thing is it's a rag quilt and doesn't need to be perfect. The final sewing step is to sew around the edges. Again it's rag quilt so doesn't need any edges just a nice line.

Not sure what my "hem" measurement is but this is picture gives you an idea of how big I made my edges.



Now turn on a good movie, make yourself comfortable and start cutting. I didn't get a picture but just cut lines into the fabric to make that "rag" look.

And because I had extra fabric and squares I decided to make a bib for my friend using the same method. It was cute but not really sure if it's very practical. It was thick and didn't just sit flush. But it was a fun add on I guess.



And the final project again. I'm hoping to see some pictures with the baby (born Jan 7 on his due date!) so check back for more pictures.