Baby Quilt Commission

baby quilt by Monica Hayden

I have not done this in a while - posted a brief note about some of our past projects.

Elizabeth from the Hazelwood House gift store in Hot Springs requested I make a baby quilt for a friend's baby shower. I had completed many successful projects for her over the years.

I decided on a lovely zig zag pattern, and it was made out of flannel, which was a bear to quilt!

It kept puckering, and caused acute frustration and mayhem for the quilter. Of all the quilts I've ever made, this is the one, simple and cute and inoffensive though it looks, that I almost completely gave up on. I had to, at least once every 5 minutes, undo stitches and start over due to the overly pliable fabric used as backing puckering. Were it not for that, the quilt would have taken 1/3 less time to make.

The reason I chose flannel , aside from my being crazy and wishing to make life harder for myself, was that I thought that flannel was a sweet fabric for a baby - cute, snuggly, and overall as comforting as they come. In fact, other people DO quilt with flannel - here is a great example  of lovely flannel quilts:

from Nesha's Vintage Niche or flickr here

photo from moon angel flickr -flannel back and view of machine-quilted grid

Here, in fact, a nice quilter provides great info and tips on quilting with this type of fabric. Wish I'd seen this article at the time!

The opposite side was an even softer kind of flannel. It was too big to stabilize, but then it would've made it stiff - besides requiring obscene quantities of stabilizer.

At the end of the day though, persistence won out, and then fluffy, nightmare baby quilt arrived at its destination and was loved and enjoyed by all.