Liam's Baby Feet Quilt

On January 2, 2005 I recieved a telephone call from my friend Arin.

"I have a present for you," she said. "I can give it to you now if you like."

I am not a patient woman. I demanded my present.

"You said you needed lots of advance warning to make a baby quilt," she said. "Is seven months enough?"

(insert the sound of me squeaking and sending many happy congratulations to both her and her husband.)

I had told Arin that she would need to give me a lot of warning should she ever need a quilt of a baby-ish nature, as I had a design all planned. What she didn't know was that I also had all the fabric bought months before (August 2004, to be exact). From talking to her and Ron I just had a feeling that it wouldn't be long before I'd need it.

The quilt is a triple irish chain, with a bit of a twist. Traditionally, the triple chains are done in three colours. In this design I have four. So the blue and pink chains in this quilt should technically be one colour. I have never been one for following directions exactly.

Irish chain quilts are beautiful designs but they can be a bit finicky. The corners on all of those blocks have to match up pretty evenly or the quilt looks lopsided. I tried to be careful in keeping all of my seams to 1/4", but even so I had to remake one of my blocks.

It's difficult to describe exactly how the design comes together, but I found a very good online overview of the two types of blocks involved, and how the individual blocks disappear into the overall pattern when they're stitched together. Unfortunately, the web page I used no longer exists, but you can look here for something similar.

This is the complete quilt front. The blocks are 1.5" finished size, and the borders are 3", making the finished size 37.5 x 49.5 inches. Give or take. I doubt my piecing is quite that exact.

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The back of the quilt is a batik fabric which complements the front. The seam binding is made from the same aquamarine fabric as the front border.

At the bottom of the quilt you can see the tag I added (a detail is further down the page).

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This is a detail of the patchwork on the front of the quilt. Each of the three central colours is pulled from the design on the aqua fabric.

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The applique in the centre of the white squares is a footprint image I made in Photoshop. They have a footprint shape tool, which I adjusted to get the shape I wanted (the sole wasn't quite full enough). Yes, the toes were all sewn on separately. Yes, it was a pain.

I made each applique from a piece of interfacing, which I fused to the wrong side of the quilt fabric, and then cut out with a 1/4" seam. I turned the seams as I went. I like using interfacing as the backing for some applique as it gives more depth to the image. Also, worrying about removing freezer paper from fifty tiny toes would have made my brain hurt.

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This is another detail of the feet pattern, this time one of the pink feet.

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This is a closeup of the quilting on the border. It's a spiral/wave pattern I bought a template for at the local quilt store. The template spiral wasn't wide enough to cover the border, so I traced and quilted it twice.

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Finally, the last step in the quilting process is to put a tag on the quilt. I made this one using my footprint template, which I rotated in Photoshop and saved as a bunch of different documents. I then created a table in Word and turned the footprints into a border, and put text in the middle. Is there an easier way to do this in Photoshop? Probably. Do I know what it is? Nope.

(Click on the thumbnail for a larger image)