Earlier this year, my husband’s cousin had a baby boy named Jason. I had been wanting to try my hand at quilting for a while, so I decided it was the perfect time to start, so I could make a gift for the baby. My husband bought me a sewing machine that previous January and I was dying to use it, this was the perfect excuse!

I went to JoAnn’s (my favorite craft store) and started in the books section. I ended up buying Quilts for Baby: Easy As ABC by Ursula Reikes. If you know a bit about sewing but nothing about quilting, like me, this is a great book to start with. It tells you everything you’ll need to quilt, and it has lots of simple starter quilts with very clear, easy to understand directions. Apparently the design I chose was one of the harder ones, but it didn’t feel like it with this book.

Fabrics I chose for the quilt.

Piecing together the squares was a bit challenging, as you can see. Not all of my blocks match up perfectly, but that’s something that comes with practice. Improved skill in cutting and sewing straight will correct those types of mistakes.

I thought my sewing machine wouldn’t be able to handle machine quilting the blanket, so I ended up quilting it by hand! You can see here in the picture that I mis-cut the backer for the quilt, so I used some scraps I had to supplement the width.

Finally the quilt is done!

The quilting lines are a bit crooked, but that can be solved by using a quilting frame that I ended up buying after this project was finished. I was pretty satisfied with the outcome, especially for my first quilt, and eager to start the next one. 🙂