Bugs! for a baby boy's quilt

"Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails,

That's what little boys are made of!"

...and that's what's in this quilt for a newborn baby boy!  Well maybe not 'puppy dogs tails' but there's plenty of snails and bugs.

You might remember this photo, below, from yesterday's post as my entry for Lily Pad Quilting's annual Pet on Quilts Show 2014... thank you so much for all the kind comments!

This quilt's story began with wanting to make a quilt for a friend's daughter's baby boy, who is due any day now.  All the fabrics used in this quilt came from my stash and it was such fun to pull the colors together - usually a weakness of mine, but think they worked really well on this quilt.  Love the happy bugs!

Inspired by Lori's Rail Fence Baby Quilt, decided on 4 - 2 1/2" wide strips to make an 8 1/2" wide block.  The problem was, my 'rail fence' design didn't look anywhere near like hers with the fabrics I'd chosen.  In fact, it looked awful.  Decisions, decisions.  After playing around with the blocks on my flannel wall, settled on this simple design incorporating a lot of white.  It needed the white to offset the bright fabric, I think.   Forgot to take a pre-quilted photo.

Added a few 'bug accent' fussy cut pieces here and there.

Pieced, sandwiched, pinned and ready to quilt.  Now what quilting 'design' to do?  More decisions!

This is only my second quilt I've ever made and not owning a walking foot for my machine I was reeeeeaaally nervous about messing up this cute quilt with the quilting.  After looking at quilts on the internet, it seemed the 'waves' and 'curls' are popular.  I practiced free motion quilting (fmq) on this little 5"x8" sandwich....

...I practiced on the extra quilt block sandwich I'd made.... 

...and still didn't feel this was going to look right for this quilt until I started fooling around with the settings on my machine and came up with this wavy stitch in the white sashing, photo below.  This would (could!!) be doable for me.

My machine calls this a 'running stitch' and I extended the stitch length to 3 and elongated the entire stitch 'pattern' with the bottom right hand setting.  I'm writing and photographing all this so I will remember what I did for the next time I want this wavy stitch!  I really like it.

I used my presser foot guide to match up with the 'ditch' and wavy stitched all seams.  Then did a couple of wavy lines in the border sashing.

Found stripe fabric in my stash that matched the colors of this quilt to use for the binding.  The binding was cut on grain, not bias, but worked fine for this application.  Used my Alabama Quilt post links to re-read the post on how I made the binding and bound that quilt.

Again, used Wendi's technique at Shiny Happy World How to Bind a Quilt's video with the exception, again, that I sewed the binding to the back first...

....then machine stitched very carefully to the front.  I love how she has you join the ends of the binding.  It is so easy and the results are nice and neat.

My daughter was great help in being the quilt holder this morning!  The quilt finished at 31" x 31".... a little smaller than I wanted, but that was all the fabric I had!
The front.....

.....the back.  I really sweated this back as I didn't have enough of any one color, so thought I'd be most clever making a square of light blue trimmed in white neglecting to think about lining everything up when sandwiching.  I was so afraid my 'square' on the back would come out catawampus.   It came out fine.   Whew!    You can see the quilting drag lines that I think a walking foot would take care of.  Oh well.

 It folds up nice and square. 

It was nice taking a little break from garment sewing and work on my quilting skills.  Now I'm ready to make another Kirsten Tee, or two, and copy that rtw Peasant Skirt..... and plan another quilt....:)!