clothes – Karabu Creations

The friendly quilters over at TheQuiltShow.com gave me wonderful advice about how to begin my quilt made from baby clothes. I was concerned because almost all the baby clothes are knits, and will be easy to stretch during sewing. Their advice: Use a fusible interfacing as a stabilizer to prevent stretching.

It’s worked wonderfully so far. Here’s the first block I made:

I wanted the quilt to use a variety of traditional star blocks. I picked this block to start with because it had a nice big center square where I could fit one of the cute applique embellishments from a toddler shirt. A lot of the clothing has appliques like this that I want to include, and I can this way. The fusible interfacing worked great. I bought the lightest weight interfacing I could find. The clothes are already a heaver fabric than the normal 100% quilting cotton I normally use, so I didn’t want to add any more weight than necessary.

I bet this will be a very nice soft, warm quilt by the time it’s done. I still can’t quite close the drawer that I’m storing old baby clothes in, plus the little one is about ready to go up a clothing size again, so I’d better get going on this project!

Have you ever made a quilt from baby clothes? If so, share your tip in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been saving old baby clothes for years now, with the plan to turn them into a quilt someday. I decided to only save clothes that were torn or stained so I couldn’t give them away for someone else to use, or if an item had a lot of sentimental value.

I now have a drawer full of clothes, so I think it’s time to get serious about making that baby clothes quilt!

I’ve seen a lot of scrap quilts that I like the look of. The problem is that most that I like have small pieces that are all the same size. Small pieces are good for small baby clothes, but many of the clothes I saved have cute applique or other images on them that aren’t all that small. I was looking for a quilt pattern that would let me use mostly small pieces, and some larger ones.

Today I found this website:
http://www.ufo-rphanage.com/scrap_quilts.shtml

So many quilt pattern sites have old, out-dated, non-functioning links that it can get very frustrating to search for quilt patterns. One or two on the UFO website were dead links, but the rest were a gold mine!

So far, this is the pattern I’m leaning toward:
http://www.ezquilt.com/patterns/oldfashioned/oldfashioned.htm

Although, I think I may make my blocks slightly bigger than this pattern calls for. I like that I can use a bigger piece (like the pictures I want to save) for the center of the blocks, and then use up all the tiny pieces from sleeves, etc. for the rest. You need to use a little imagination to picture a scrappy finished quilt in color, but the picture in my head looks cool.

If you have a favorite scrap quilt pattern, share it here! I can’t seem to part with my scraps, so I’ll always be looking for great scrap quilt patterns!

Tag: clothes

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Making scrap quilts out of old baby clothes