Elmo's Baby Quilt and Pillow

**dusts off cobwebs** Well, hello there! Long time no see. We certainly didn’t intend to take such a long blog break, but as usual life happened and we’ve been busy! After all, running after toddlers can really put a dent in your free time ;) But I am super excited about my latest quilting project and I couldn’t wait to share it with you!

As some of you long-time readers my recall, we are actually a threesome. But knitting had to take a sideline for Nasus while she went to law school, took the bar, and became a practicing attorney (Yay, Nasus!). However, we are happy to report that Nasus is expecting her first child, a little girl, this coming October…which of course meant a good excuse for a new quilt!

Last year at the Long Beach Quilt Show, I put together some Japanese import fat quarters from a couple different booths. I fell in love with the cute and charming little prints and knew that I wanted to feature them in a quilt project. I found some nice coordinating red prints to go with the cream character prints. When I got home I put everything away and promptly forgot all about them.

When we first found out that Nasus was pregnant, I immediately started scheming for an appropriate project. I had initially planned to use some of my Riley stash, since it is pretty girly, but when I went digging through everything, I came across the Japanese prints and instantly knew those were the prints for Nasus. I knew the red and cream with be a good fit for this project, since Nasus is a bit on the nontraditional side, like me, when it comes to pink=girl/ blue=boy scale of baby items. Plus, although in my heart I knew she was having a girl, Nasus hadn’t actually found out the gender of the baby when I started this project.

I played around with a stacked coin idea for this quilt, but when Oh, Fransson! re-released her Simple Modern Baby Quilts pattern, the stacked version was perfect for the fabrics I had.

In addition to the Japanese fat quarters, I added the primarily blue print (also a Japanese import) and the red with blue checks print for the binding and some of the red ‘stacks’. The solid is a red Kona solid, I believe in tomato. These additions came from Levine’s during my first ever trip to the L.A. fabric district. (So much fun! I was like a kid in a candy store!)

The piecing of this project was super easy, although I learned that I need to work on my ‘scant ¼ inch seams’. And with the extra bits leftover from the quick piecing method used to make the blocks for the quilt, I decided to make a coordinating pillow.

Now, I know babies don’t use pillows and when I received a similarly sized pillow for my own baby shower, I couldn’t imagine what I would ever use it for…until Elliott got close to a year and loved playing with our pillows. Then it dawned on me that he was physically mature enough that a smooth pillow was no longer a serious suffocation hazard. I put his pillow in his crib and the rest is history! It is now one of this favorite things and he falls asleep every night on his pillow.

I’ve never made a pillow before and thought it would be fun. I more or less winged the pattern, just playing around with my scraps. I also wanted to add a zipper so that the pillow could be washed when the pillow inevitable got blurped on or smeared with godknowswhat. I learned how to put in an invisible zipper and while it certainly isn’t perfect, it really makes it look more professional. B was very impressed ;)

So there you have it…Elmo’s baby quilt and matching pillow. I can’t wait to meet Nasus’ little girl and I hope she enjoys her gifties!