A Dolly Quilt for Christmas

This is the last Christmas gift that I am going to be posting about. I have shared a lot of the things that I made for my oldest daughter for Christmas but she is not the only one that I made gifts for. I made more for her than I did for any of the other kids, we hardly bought any of her gifts, but I did make a few other things. One of the other things that I made was a baby doll quilt for my middle daughter, Lucy. She got a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. We joked a little that it was like 1980 something in our house on Christmas morning, in addition to Lucy's Cabbage Patch doll, our youngest daughter got a Care Bear and our youngest son got Transformers. It was like we were reliving our childhood Christmases. Anyway, back to the quilt. I thought that Lucy would like a few little accessories to go along with her baby and of course one of those things had to be a little doll quilt. 

It was kind of funny because it didn't dawn on me until I had both tops finished that I had used the same design for both this quilt and the quilt for the American Girl doll bed. I used much smaller squares for that one but the same four patch/big square design. This quilt started with the fabric that I used for the bigger squares, the bug/butterfly/flower print. That was actually some fabric that I had pulled out for the doll bed bedding but the green paint that we bought was too limey and the green in this fabric is much more of a sagey green. I figured since I already had it out I might as well use it so I dug through my scraps to find some pieces to match it, cut out some squares and pieced it together. I wanted something simple and scrappy which is why I chose the pattern that I did. I could use a bigger square to show off the fabric that I had started with and that tied all of the other colors together and use small scraps for the smaller squares. I cut out 6 1/2 inch squares for the big squares and 3 1/2 inch squares for the smaller ones so that finished they would be 6 inches and 3 inches. I did 4 blocks across and down so the quilt ended up being about 24 inches square.

When I looked at these pictures I realized that I really need to be better about ironing, both while sewing and before taking pictures. The truth is all of these Christmas gifts were sewn late at night after the kids were in bed and then stuffed in a hiding place so that they wouldn't be found. At that point perfection was not always the most important thing. Usually I was just trying to hurry and finish so that I could go to bed myself and sometimes that meant skipping steps like ironing.

I bound the quilt with a solid pink using a method that I had seen someone use on Instagram where you use a blanket stitch to sew the binding down. You can find the tutorial here. In the Instagram picture I saw using this technique I thought it looked interesting so I tried it on both of the doll quilts that I made. It was nice because it was a lot quicker than sewing it down by hand, especially for a doll quilt, but the truth is I didn't really care for the way that it turned out. I had a hard time keeping it nice and straight. I will probably with stick with the way that I have always done it rather than doing it this way again. To be fair some of the issues were probably because I was going simply off of what I saw in a picture, I only found the tutorial for this post, so I didn't exactly follow the directions. Maybe I will give it another try after reading through the tutorial, but I don't know. After trying it I decided that I think that I'm just not a fan of the way it looks.

I backed it in some old flannel that was given to me by my husband's grandma and happened to match really well. Because I used scraps and fabric that had been given to me this little quilt cost me nothing to make. Just by spending a little time in the evenings I was able to make something to add to my daughters Christmas gift without spending any more money and going over the budget that we had set. That is one of the things that I love about sewing, and other crafts, I can often make nice gifts for my kids or for other people without needing to spend a lot of money. And, it is always fun to give a gift that is completely unique so you know that they won't be getting the same thing from anyone else.