Soft 'n Snugly Baby Quilt

Recently I needed to make a baby quilt for a gift, but didn't have much time and not quite enough material to make what I had in mind.

Then I remembered my friend Traci makes these really cute rag quilts with fabric scraps and I thought maybe I could try to do something similar.

As I was sorting through my scraps I got the idea to make a quilt of all of my different "soft and textured" fabrics.  Since babies like lots of different textures I thought it might be kind of fun to make a quilt with lots of different fabrics. I ended up using corduroy, minke, flannel, chenille and satin all on the same quilt.

This is how I made it:

I started by gathering fabrics that all coordinated and cut them into random sizes.  My smallest piece of fabric was 35" long so I cut all of the fabrics to 35" with widths varying from 3" - 10".  I didn't plan it out at all or think about it, I just started chopping up fabric. (yeah, I know, not always a good idea)...

I then just started sewing the strips together. I made sure the minke was not on one of the ends (it stretches and I needed to keep the quilt straight) and that no 2 "like" fabrics were next to each other. You can't tell from the photo but I cut the 2 corduroy fabrics (the red and turquoise) opposite ways so that the wale of the corduroy was different on each one. (Just to add more visual texture).

After I thought the quilt looked like a good size I stopped sewing on extra strips.  It ended up being about 35" wide by 50" tall.

I then quilted it with a stitch in the ditch over the seams, using more flannel as the backing. (Now that I think of it, a pieced backing may have been cute for this project).  

For the binding I used some satin blanket binding. It was the first time I've used it  and it was MUCH easier than I thought. (I bought it a while ago and was afraid to try it out!!).

After a trip through the wash and the GENEROUS use of a lint roller, it was soft and snugly and ready to give away.

I'm very happy with how it turned out.  Mostly because it only took about 2 hours to make and I was able to use up a lot of scraps of fabric that I had left over from other projects.