Alistair's Quilt

by Jessie Baird
(San Francisco, CA)

I made this quilt when my oldest friend (we met in preschool!) was pregnant with her first baby. I wanted to make a quilt that would look nice in their yellow and orange nursery, and would be gender neutral and modern. But at the same time, since it is a baby quilt, I wanted it to be cheerful and cozy!

To achieve that, I used flannel for the backing and as the main fabric on the front. I also pre-washed the fabrics and used cotton batting so that the shrinking of the batting would create a slightly puckered, soft feeling.

The design is my own and was inspired by the backing fabric, a striped flannel. The pieced strip on the front echoes the colors of the stripes in the flannel.

The quilt is machine pieced and quilted. I used wide masking tape placed on a diagonal on the quilt as a guideline for quilting. Then I stitched along the stripes on the back to add top-to-bottom lines of quilting as well. I like the fact that the vertical lines disappear into the stripes on the back, so that the quilting pattern looks slightly different on the front and back.

I hand bound the quilt with turquoise fabric with tiny white dots. Once Alistair was born I embroidered his name freehand in variegated orange/yellow floss on the bottom corner of the quilt.

This was my second quilting project. The first was also a baby quilt. The quilt measures about 42 inches by 34 inches. Normally I try very hard not to remember how long a craft project takes me. I'm afraid it would scare me off the next project! But I enjoyed working in this quilt, however long it took.