The Dot

This post has been transferred from my previous blog. If you're visiting here from MlleOiseau, I'm happy to welcome you to my new space!

So, it seems that everyone around me is having a baby right now, and every last one of them is a girl! It's very exciting.

This adorable baby-in-the-making is my first niece, affectionately referred to as "the dot" by my fiance and I. She's a 2011 model (but cutting it close!) so she'll be here any day now.

I had the great pleasure of hostessing a baby shower for my sister and the dot this weekend. I'm not going to go over every detail of the party planning, but I'll probably post a few photos (once I get through them all) to describe what I managed to pull off, in case you're planning a similar celebration yourself!

Anyway, I haven't posted in awhile because I'm in grad school my hands were too busy to type while I was working on this party and the gifts for my sister. Now that the party is over and the gifts have been safely delivered, though, I can finally show you what I've been up to!

While I decided to pick up a few practical items for my sister from her registry, I also wanted to gift the dot something personal and steeped with love, and what can better say that than a handmade baby quilt?

Here is a quick description of how I made the quilt, inspired by this pattern at Red Pepper Quilts. Instead of 1.5" x 5.5" strips, I cut 2" strips that were slightly longer than 4" from a host of pink fabrics that I've been hoarding. I stitched these together into 3 and 5 strip sets, then cut them perpendicularly into 2" strips. I attached these strips to a 4 3/4" center square (my 1/4" seams are a little off, it seems). Alternatively, I sewed 2" white sashes around a 4 3/4" block of my pattern of choice. I pieced the blocks into rows, and then pieced the rows together.

To finish the quilt, I used Warm and White cotton batting (my favourite) and backed the quilt with slightly less than a yard of Kona Cotton Solids in Sangria. I stitched in the ditch with white thread to quilt it... it was done pretty quickly, at the last available moment. My mistake! I almost threw in the towel right there, being too prideful to deliver a gift I deemed less than perfect (and it is definitely sloppy). I'm glad my fiance talked me out of it. Imperfections are perfectly natural!

Finally, I bound the quilt using that 2" satin blanket binding you can buy at the store sewn on with a 1/2" seam allowance--I chose this binding as an homage to my sister's much beloved baby blanket, whose satin edge was tattered to threads by the time she was done with it!