Toddler Boy Quilt 01 - Expanding

One of my favorite sewing You Tube channels is The Stitch TV. One of the hosts, Pam, is someone I admire. She's an engineer and a quilter, something I'm aiming to achieve within the next couple of years. She is no nonsense and just unapologetically herself. One piece of advice, or more accurately tag phrase, she gives, I embraced recently: "Babies don't care." That simple phrase freed me from worrying over making the perfect baby quilts. It allowed me to feel free to try new techniques and fudge some trouble spots I came across while making a quilt for my 2.5 year old nephew. I'll post the completed quilt in another post, I still need to get some good pictures, but I'd like to describe some of the things I've done to this quilt.

I purchased a set of 20 fat quarters from Connecting Threads on clearance back in 2015, at least that's the copyright date on the selvedge. The line was called Blast Off! and is extremely bright with a spaceman and alien theme. I showed it to my sister soon after my nephew was born and she loved it so I decided to make a quilt for him from the set.

It first started as a QAYG project from Marti Michell's machine quilting in sections class on what was then Craftsy. I had 3 long QAYG panels about 42" by 13". The pattern called for them to be joined with strips to look like thin sashings. Then life happened and I had to put it on hold for over a year.

My nephew is now practically a preschooler so I had to make his quilt bigger. Fortunately, I chose colors that could grow with him and didn't look babyish. Using Marti Michell's book Machine Quilting in Sections, I added some 4" wide strips between my panels and the first two borders. The Panels were quilted right to the edge so I layered the backing strip RST with the back of the panel and the front strip to the front side RST and sewed through all the layers.  I then sewed only the front strip to the next panel. I laid a strip of batting down between the two panels and held it in place with some basting spray. I folded the loose edge over some, glued it down to the back and then sewed it in place from the front in the ditch. I then quilted a loose wave down the strip. It's hard to explain in text but I found a video.

I thought I had invented this method but Nancy at On Point TV just published a similar method a couple of months ago but did it nicer and better than I did. It looks beautiful and seamless and I highly recommend her method. I had to stitch a line of quilting about a half and inch in from the seam to hold my batting in place but she used fusible batting tape so she didn't have to worry about the edge. You can find a complete playlist here with all the details on how to do the best QAYG method I've ever seen. I'm going to use it on the next big quilt I need to quilt.

Here's the results of adding some extra strips to the Toddler Boy Quilt

Front

and back.

These pictures were taken before I figured out how to get a better image with my phone but you get the idea. I went from a baby quilt about 40" square and I'm turning it into one about 50" square.