Are there times in your life when you fill like everyone around you is expecting a baby? It seems like that’s the case for me right now. Pretty exciting! But now I need to make baby gifts.

When you love to sew and make things as gifts for people, the most natural gift for a new baby is a quilt. At a time like this, I find that I need quick baby quilts, that will still have a great look. I found a great book called “Crazy for Baby” by Me & My Sister Designs. The book features four fast and fun quilt ideas with 10 color variations.

It seems that when I’m in the fabric store, I always find lots of great juvenile theme fabrics. The only problem with these fabrics is that you won’t want to cut them into small pieces for quilt blocks – the whole look of the fabric would be lost. What I really like about this book is that you can take a juvenile fabric and use for a center panel. You than sew pieced blocks around the large picture. How easy and fast is that? You’ll probably want to make more than one project out of this book!

My granddaughter got a Care Bear for Christmas, and when I found this cute fabric at Hancock Fabrics I thought her Care Bear might need a blanket.

For the pinwheel quilt blocks, I went to the section in the store where they have the Fat Quarter single program. This is a great program, fat quarters arranged on an upright rack by color and shade. Shopping through these is always fun and inspiring. It was so simple to pick-up 5 different fat quarters to complete my color selection.

You can complete this quilt top in a day easily. Perfect for a quick gift for a new baby (or bear) in the family! My finished quilt was 45″ x 50″, yours may be different if you change the borders on the quilt.

After I finished this quilt, I looked around Hancock Fabrics for some other fabrics that would work for this type of quilt. There are so many fun theme fabrics out there! Here are just a few of the other fabrics I may have to consider some day.

And look what came with the Care Bear fabrics. . . a fabric book panel. Make this up and give to the newcomer!

Sheila Reinke, Heart of Sewing
Sheila