Project #10: Baseball Baby Quilt

I like to lovingly refer to this project as "That stupid quilt". Oh it gave me lots of troubles. You know, like buying the wrong amount of fabric, not squaring up properly while I was piecing it, evil quilting puckers and all that jazz. I'm sure I would have called the quilt something else if I weren't watching my language around Blockette.

This was the first quilt that I designed completely from scratch. The new-baby-to-be's parents are big White Sox fans, so I wanted to do a baseball themed quilt. Ugh. Do you know that the existing baseball patterns are way complicated? At least way complicated for my skill level. My second thought for this quilt was to use baseball themed fabrics in a 9 patch of some sort. But nooooo...I couldn't find enough baseball-y type fabric for that.

So I winged it and made up a simple pattern of baseballs bouncing on a black background. Why a black background? Two reasons: 1.) The White Sox team colors are white and black and 2.) The first colors a baby sees are high contrast colors like white, red and black. This was my first attempt at applique on a quilt. I am very pleased with how it turned out. Go ahead and click on the picture. I'm especially proud of the stitching on the balls.

The movement lines are appliqued strips of bias tape. I'm pretty pleased with thinking of that idea as well. Appliqueing regular strips of fabric would have been horrible. Here's the quilt label with more applique. It is a simplified version of one of the White Sox's logos. It looks better in person. The little sock is my favorite part of this quilt, well, aside from the baseball seam stitching.

For all my ornery talk, this quilt probably turned out the nicest. Any puckers are hidden quite amazingly by the flag print on the back. This quilt is also the first quilt to lay flat. The corners also appear to be square as well. I didn't check. All I'm concerned about is that it looks nice, actual accuracy is for the birds. Besides, what parent of a newborn is going to get out their measuring equipment. "Ah yes, it is 3 AM and the baby is screaming, but I want to know if that quilt is off from square by 1/8 of an inch. Damn that woman and her rotary cutting skills!" Yeah. I think not.

Anyhow the darn thing is done and over with. Hopefully the recipients will appreciate it and it will see lots of poop and pee and pukie.