Handmade Baby Quilt

Ezra’s quilt.

I wanted to post this probably a year ago, maybe even longer, but never really dedicated a post to it, so why not now. We worked so hard on this quilt and I still love it as much as I did the day it was completed. You can see the rest of the boy's shared room here.

handmade baby quilt 17 months later with 17 month old Ezra 

During my pregnancy with Ezra, I knew I wanted to do all the special things we did for Jonah for him as well because I couldn’t be that mom that just gave her child all the hand-me-downs and be happy with it. Not that moms do that for second children, but for some reason I thought maybe that would happen. Maybe it was just how unbelievably tired I felt during that pregnancy!

I decided I wanted to go bigger than we did with Jonah’ s baby quilt, which I still love but it’s truly for a baby and when they really get to use it they are a little older. So, we went with approximately a 36x50” quilt. That’s basically the standard size for a pottery barn quilt. We even stretched the dimensions a little knowing that with all the straight lines we were trying to achieve, we would wind up cutting it down. To be honest when you look up tutorials on strip quilts, most quilters have them in the easy category and say they take them like two hours to make, well if you aren’t an experienced quilter, I’d give yourself a few weeks. Haha! I say that because making all the fabric decisions, cutting, laying out an order all takes time. For me, I was trying to make something special for my baby and I included my mom and sister’s knowledge and opinions and that probably made our process longer because we are a bunch of weigh-all-the-options, indecisive ladies. Add my pregnancy brain and lethargy to that and I have no idea how long it actually took because I fell asleep on the couch while my mom finished quilting it! This was about a week before Ezra’s birth.

For our strip quilt, we used 20 strips of horizontally cut fabrics varying from 1 inch to 5 inches, we used a 1/4“ seam allowance, and an off-set cross for the back. I purchased fabric from Fabricworm, Spoonflower, and JoAnn. I bought pre folded binding at Hancock fabrics and got really lucky with the beautiful color that matched so well! 

Throughout our process we referenced several tutorials and examined many photos to get an idea of what we really wanted! After the strips were attached and we had a front, back and batting for the middle, we quilted 1/4" from each seam. Here is a great tutorial that explains the step-by-step process a little better! Quilt As You Go Strip Quilt 

I hope this quilt travels with in throughout his life and we can say it was his forever. I hope he can one day snuggle his babies in this quilt and tell them how his mommy, nonnie, and aunt made is especially for him.