Rag quilt, done at last!

I finally finished the quilt I have been working on for big brother!  I’m so excited.  Many websites led me to believe that making a rag quilt is a simple, couple-of-hours project.  Wrong!  So here’s the story.  Lately I have been sewing a lot of baby gifts for friends, and I love doing baby gifts, it’s a ton of fun, but lately I felt like I was neglecting my own kiddos in my sewing.  So I quickly put together a blanket for little brother out of scraps from my endless supply of Joann’s snuggle flannel.

Cute, eh?

I thought that was better than a picture of the blanket alone.  🙂  Then I took big brother to Joann one day and let him pick some fabrics for a blanket of his own.  He very excitedly chose Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, neon green, and some construction machines.  Organizing them in an aesthetically appealing way was a challenge!  For the actual construction, I found a tutorial at Green Apple Orchard, and more or less followed it.  I started it back when I posted the yogurt tutorial, so it’s been about a month of work!  Now, to be fair, we were out of town for a while, and I might have worked on other projects too, but this was most of the sewing I’ve done.  And it’s only toddler bed sized!

The top

Closer view of the top

The back of the quilt

The navy and stripes were fabrics I had on hand.  There’s one big “oops”; can you see it?

After all that, I have to say that BB was not that excited about it.  Oh, well.  I’m excited to have finished my first real quilt!  I thought I would add a few tips from the experience, for anyone who wants to try it themselves:

* This would have been so much easier if I had planned the size out and THEN gone fabric shopping.  As it was, I let BB pick fabrics then bought a random amount of each.  This is a really dumb way to go about making a quilt.

* I pre-washed the fabrics out of habit, then read it was unnecessary.  The cutting would have been a lot easier on unwashed fabrics.  Oops.

*  My final big oops was in the ragging–I spent hours cutting the edges every 1/4″, and I thought I was being careful, but I must have cut seams, because when the quilt came out of the dryer, it was full of holes.  I went back and sewed them up, but I should have been more careful initially.

That’s it!  I think next time it will be a lot easier, and there probably will be a next time, when BB moves to a bigger bed.