More on Making a Quilt from Baby Clothes

January 19, 2009 Kara Hartz3 Comments

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.

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Why It’s Important to Prewash Fabric

July 8, 2008 Kara HartzLeave a comment

Especially for Projects for Kids and For Quilts.

I use 100% cotton fabric for almost all my sewing. I just really like it. Occasionally I’ll use a blend or another kind of fabric if it’s something sentimental for personal use. Some fabric requires special care, or dry cleaning. I’m not talking about those fabrics in this post – I just don’t know enough about them. But cotton fabrics, quilting fabrics, cute novelty prints, etc all should be washed first, and here’s why:

There’s lots of tips out there for quilters about the importance of pre-washing fabrics. Different fabrics may shrink at different rates, even if they’re all 100% cotton. If you want your quilt that you’ve spent hours and weeks and months making to hold up over time, you don’t want different parts to shrink and other parts not to, thus pulling or distorting the quit, even tearing it in extreme cases.

While this is an excellent reason to pre-wash all your fabrics, it isn’t the most important reason, in my opinion.

When fabrics are made, all kinds of chemicals are used during production, and dying. The chemicals treat the fabrics, and help the colors stay true, and generally assist in production at many stages. However, those chemicals are still there when the finished bolt goes out to stores. The most famous of these is formaldehyde, but other chemicals are used too.

There is no way I want to snuggle under a quilt full of formaldehyde and other chemicals. And there is sure as heck no way I’m letting my child snuggle under that quilt or play with a toy that hasn’t had the chemicals washed out of it.

While it may sound too easy that all you have to do to get rid of these horrible chemicals is throw the fabric in the wash, that’s really all the experts say you need to do. In all my research, every authority and expert I’ve found says that as bad as these substances are, washing gets rid of them. It’s that simple.

So while it may be a bit time consuming, and, yes, it may require a little bit of pressing if the fabric wrinkles, it’s just too important a step to skip. If you are making something that a baby may possibly put in their mouth, (like everything I make) please, PLEASE, PLEASE pre-wash your fabrics.

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The Quilted I-Spy Sceurity Blanket

January 10, 2008 Kara Hartz1 Comment

When I was little, I remember laying in bed and studying all the different pictures, prints, and fabrics on my bed quilt. Some zigzag lines in orange and blue. Little girls in hats – there were several different versions of this same print, each with a different accent color. Then there were some solid colored squares. Even though there weren’t that many different patterns, I loved to look at them over and over again.

So I blame my grandmother, who made that quilt, for instilling the love of patchwork in me. The only thing that could have made me love that quilt more would have been even more neat fabrics to look at.

When I had my own baby, I was a fairly new quilter myself. I started collecting neat prints so that I could make her a bed quilt with as many different fabrics as possible. The one I made her has literally hundreds of pictures. And she loves it.

But, I also wanted something simple we could play baby games with. Learn colors. Make animal sounds, and learn animal names. Play peekaboo. The idea for the I spy security blanket was born.

I always include one square each of the basic colors. Colors are easy to learn, and babies love to show off when they know where the red square is. I think it breaks up all the prints to throw in some solid spaces too. The other squares are full of as many different, bright, fun prints as I can find. The easiest way to cut squares is with a rotary cutter, but I just can’t settle for that all the time. With larger prints, it’s too easy to get only the bottom half of an animal – or just an ear. What fun is that? The extra time and effort it takes to carefully cut out specific images from fabric, so that I get a perfectly centered animal, or truck, or whatever, is what makes these so special. I really love the way they look in the end.

Because they are so small, only twenty inches square, they would be to bulky with batting in them, so they aren’t true quilts. Yet two layers of thin cotton would be flimsy, so I use flannel for the backing. It’s soft, and provides just the perfect weight. Then I go ahead and stitch around each block, just like it really is a quilt. Those extra stitches let my blankets stand up to all kinds of rough treatment, and wash after wash after wash.

I keep thinking I should make new blankets for my new baby, but the ones I made four years ago are still in great shape. They aren’t just used for peekaboo anymore though. They’re superhero capes, and baby doll blankets. Something new everyday it seems at times.

And that’s why I love to make them.