Boy Coins

Right before we went away on our trips back East, I managed to finish this stacked coins quilt for our new nephew. I used the prettiest fabric, which must now be out of print, because I can't find it anymore. The day before we headed out on vacation, it was awfully rainy and overcast, so forgive the awful photos I have today. They're the only ones I managed to take before giving the quilt to its recipient.

I decided to keep it light on the quilting, because I wanted it to be soft and squishy... just right for a baby to do lots of tummy time on it (and because I hadn't mustered up the courage to try free hand quilting yet!). I ended up just quilting about 1/8" to the inside and outside of each stack of coins. It seemed like a great idea: keeping it simple and allowing me to spend the extra time hand-stitching the binding.

In hindsight, though, it really wasn't a good choice for this sort of quilt, with the long and narrow stack of coins. I'll blame my poor choice in my lack of quilting experience. You can see in this bottom picture how, once washed, it just wrinkled up to look a little like little ruffles sewn together. It was soft, which is what I was going for, but I really didn't love how it turned out. Sadly, I didn't have enough time to rip it out and hand-quilt it, but I guess that's alright.

I ended up using some really pretty, dark blue "marbled" fabric for the binding, which I think works well as it frames the quilt. I'm a big fan of really dark binding... and it worked well with the darker blues and purples of the coins.

The backing is, perhaps, my favorite fabric of all the ones I used... Those froggies just melt my heart and make me smile. I only had a yard of it on hand, so I had to piece the backing and ended up adding a strip of deep marbled purple in there. I don't have a picture of it, but I promise it looked good. Since the quilt was about 32"x44", I just barely had any froggy fabric left over. But you better believe I saved even the tiniest of scraps, and am hoping to use some of the larger pieces in an "I Spy" quilt for the Monkey.

Despite the awful quilting, I was really happy with the baby quilt and especially happy to have made something for our newest family member. Another bonus? All fabric used was from my stash!