Finished Project: Elephant Baby Blanket

One of these days I’ll do an actual tutorial type post on one of the quilts I make….one day…

But today I’m just going to share a blanket I made for Wendy’s cousin who was born only 6 days before her (on Ben’s side).

Baby blankets are probably one of my favorite projects of all time because #1. They are soft and snuggly, and #2. They are so small that you can finish them in no time at all! If only I could finish all quilts in the time it takes me to do baby blankets…

I kept things simple with the top. I had some already cut 5 inch squares, so I just laid them out and sewed them up. I was going to keep things simple with the whole quilt…but then I started getting ideas…

I can never just let things be! But I guess, in this case, I was glad to think of this. I got the idea (via Pinterest) from this site. My sister-in-law mentioned that they were wanting to decorate with elephants so this seemed perfect! I just Googled “Elephant coloring pages” and found one I liked to be my template. I used fusible interfacing (a.k.a. sticky iron on) to iron the elephants onto the backing to hold them in place.

It was my very first time machine appliqueing and I’ll admit that I had a bit of a rough start. The background fabric is minky, which is a little bit stretchy so sewing around the curves was a challenge. But I eventually got the hang of it.

I made this blanket before we moved to Arizona, which meant that I had the pleasure of taking advantage of my mom’s sewing room! She has every sewing tool you could ever dream up to use and whenever I had sewing questions I’d just have to go, “Mooooommm!!!” You know, like I was living at home again. Ha!

But the best part was being able to use her quilting machine (that’s how I made those fun loopy flowers). Having access to that machine has completely spoiled me. I’ve yet to successfully quilt something on my little sewing machine and I think it’s largely due to the fact that I’m used to the giant and oh-so-workable quilting machine my mom has. Things just get way too crampy and in the way if I attempt quilting on my machine. So I usually end up hand quilting, which I enjoy, but it takes forever. Which brings me back to this baby quilt. I quilted it in just over an hour. So speedy. So easy. It was a dream!

And I loved how this little blankie turned out.

I’ve got a couple of large quilts in the works but looking at these pictures just makes me want to scrap them all and do baby blankets the rest of my days! Then maybe I’ll be able to finish the projects I start…