It's Quilting Time

I have been wanting to take the boys baby blankets for quite some time & make them into quilts so each of the boys can have a piece of their blankets. So I finally got ambitious enough to get started on this daunting project. I researched lots of quilt designs to find one that I could duplicate three times with the amount of fabric I have. There were lots of patterns I would have loved to do, but I didn't have enough fabric for three blankets. In the end, I decided on a basic square pattern, but for the sake of time & money I decided to make rag quilts.

For those who may not know, a rag quilt is where you sew the seams on the top & outside of the quilt & then each time it gets washed the ends fray more & more until you have a soft, fuzzy blanket. The plus side to this type of blanket is once you are done sewing it together there is no need to quilt the blanket. This was a big bonus because I don't want to tie the quilts & I don't have money to take the quilt to someone to have them machine quilt it. I could have figured out how to machine quilt it on my machine, which I was planning on doing until I found the rag quilt instructions.

So I have finally finished the first quilt & found that there are still drawbacks to this style of quilt. It took me about 2 1/2 to 3 hours just to snip the edges of the quilt, which is probably about the same amount of time it would have taken me to tie the quilt. Oh well, I am really happy with the way it turned out & I am glad I chose this design.

Here are all of the blankets before I cut them up.

Here's all my little squares. The three colors on the left side are the three different backs for the three quilts. Evan's will be blue (his favorite color), Mark's will be green (his fav. color...hulk anyone?), & orange for Tyler (just because it matched the fabric).

I embroidered Evan's name on this quilt since this one is for him. I will embroider each of their names on their quilt.

This is the quilt after I pieced it together, but before I snipped the edges & washed it.

And here is the final project after it has been washed a couple of times. It was a lot of work, but I think the boys will love snuggling with them just as much as they did when they were babies.