Designing Lucy's Quilt (with Pattern Jam)

A few months after Lucy was born, I finished her baby quilt. It was the first quilt I ever made, and I still love it. However, after 5+ years, this 40"x48" quilt is a little small for my Kindergartener!

I'd been looking on pinterest and Instagram for a while, and finally found this gorgeous "Girlfriend" fabric by Ann Kelle. After looking a quilt ideas for this fabric on pinterest, I was still very uninspired, and had a hard time visualizing how it would look. Lucy did too. 

Around that same time I learned about Pattern Jam. It's a website that lets you upload your fabric and design your own quilt....for free! So I decided to try it out. First, I uploaded the Girlfriend fabric I was thinking about buying. Then I started messing around with different blocks and patterns. After each try, I would show it to Lucy, and get her approval. It was so nice to be able to show my 5 year how her quilt could look! She gave me lots of feedback. :)

We finally decide on stars. I tried a bunch of different star layouts, background colors, and border options. Again with Lucy's approval each time.

We finally settled on this design:

When I was designing this quilt, Pattern Jam only allowed you to make quilts with 12 rows and 12 columns (Now Pattern Jam upgraded to allow 16 rows and 16 columns!). Since I wanted mine to be bigger, I made this little "quilt" as an add on to make Lucy's quilt the correct size.

Also, since I wanted the "Girlfriend" squares to be one big 8"x8" square, not four 4" squares, I pasted the images in Microsoft Word and aligned the pieces to make this composite design.

I was finally ready to start shopping and sewing. Yay! I looked at the fabric requirements provided by Pattern Jam to verify how much fabric I needed. Their calculations were a bit more conservative than I wanted to be, so I used the "40 inch strips needed" column and did my own math from there. Note: I had to add these requirements to my smaller tack-on "quilt" for my total fabric requirements. And since I used one big square for the Girlfriend fabric, I disregarded the Pattern Jam calcs for that fabric and did my own math.

Then, Lucy and I went shopping! She helped me choose the fabric (and decided she wanted red, not purple). And after much cutting and sewing... here is the final quilt top!

Now I'm off to quilt and bind it! :)

Les Amis baby quilt and cloth book for Ezra!

We added a new nephew to our ever growing brood! So that means I got to sew another quilt. I am so happy with how this quilt turned out. My sister lived in France, and speaks French, so of course we used a few fabrics from the Les Amis collection by Patty Slongier. So darling. I used the Arrow Tail pattern found here. The pattern was easy to follow and although cutting took a while, the quilt actually sewed up pretty fast.

Front

 I even decided to branch out from my usual tied quilts, and machine quilted this one. I love the added dimension it gave the quilt.

Front detail

Back

Back detail -- notice the French!

Trees, all sorts of forest animals, rich blues and greens, and fluffy. Perfect for a baby boy. <3 (Notice I have to live vicariously through my sisters for baby boys) :)

Ready to mail!

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Now wait! Aren't you wondering what matching gift I came up with for the baby? Since my sister loved the French on the quilt ("Les Amis de la Foret"), I decided to make a little cloth book with French labels for sweet baby Ezra to read. I'm not going to lie -- I LOVE how it turned out. Probably one of my favorite matching gifts ever. Plus it was great practice: machine quilting (on curves, no less!), embroidery, applique, piecing, paper piecing (Butterfly pattern found here), and tiny piecing. It was time consuming, but so fun to make. Plus, as an engineer, I love finding a use for the small leftover scraps. I like to be as efficient as possible. :)