Easy Four Patch Baby quilt

Hi! today, I'm going to share with you the baby quilt that I made and then sat in the sun and quilted last week (the one and only week of summer that we've had here in the UK this year! My fabric choice is quite an unusual one. It's a far cry from the latest fabrics appearing on the shelves of the local quilt stores, but the fabrics appealed to me for several reasons:
I liked their simplicity, which seemed in keeping with a gift for a newborn.
They are organic cottons, and I'm a huge fan of organic anything, but cotton in particular - a massive amount of chemical goes into the production of standard cotton fabric.
Last, but not least - I had the fabric in my stash already!

The pattern is a very easy one - ideal for a beginner, and I've put together a tutorial, which you can download as a PDF.Just go to the tabs on my home page, select Quilt Patterns and you will find it.

The finished quilt measures approximately 36"x44" (92x112cm), but it would be very simple to make it larger if you needed. It uses Jelly Roll strips or yardage or scrap pieces, whichever you prefer.
I love adding a little hand stitching to quilts - and by that I do mean a little - I don't think I would ever hand quilt a whole quilt, but I do enjoy adding some naive style quilting in places. In this instance, I machine quilted around the four patch blocks and hand quilted the solid white blocks.

I used a Perle cotton No 8 which stands out nicely against the solid white. I chose my backing fabric  so that the hand stitching wouldn't stand out too much against it. I find it impossible to get the stitches even on both the front and the back of the quilt, so I concentrate on what they look like on the front and don't worry about what they look like on the back.

I bound the quilt with simple brown spotty fabric (this one isn't organic unfortunately).

I think it provides a nice contrast to the blues, and I happen to love blue-brown combo, so it was an easy choice.

The pdf pattern gives you all the fabric requirements and instructions, along with lots of photos to guide you if you are a new quilter.

It also gives detailed instructions on how to do the hand quilting.

I hope you find it useful.

Till next week......... Julie