A quilted playmat for baby Jacob

Earlier on in 2010, I made a quilted playmat for some lovely friends who were expecting their first child. It was my first ever quilted project. I had a lot of fun making it and the fabric was so cute that I immediately rushed out to buy another lot of the same fabric for my stash. I was hoping then to make it for someone in my family at a later point in time.

When I heard that my cousin Jason and his wife Jo in London had a baby boy named Jacob, I immediately knew I had to make it for my new little first cousin once removed.

This is the quilted playmat I made for little baby Jacob for Christmas.



It's made from a printed fabric panel of farm yard animals with co-ordinating border stripes on each side of the panel. This is the Home Farm fabric from Makover. Here's a section of the border fabric.



I used a simple pastel dotted fabric for the backing and made my own bias binding strips from a piece of Moda Marbles Red Hot fabric. Here's the backing fabric.



I machine-quilted this playmat. The straight sections were reasonably easy to manage, especially with the walking foot. I wanted to free-motion quilt around the various shapes. Now when I did this on my first playmat I put the feed-dogs down and found it very difficult to control the stitches on my machine. This time around, I decided to try the free-motion quilting with the feed-dogs up as normal. I had read somewhere that you can do this. Surprisingly, it made the machine-quilting around the shapes easier to manage ... maybe it was experience but I definately believe that having the feed-dogs up helped me maintain more control over the stitching line. Here's the stitching around the ducks ...



... and the sheep and mouse.



I quilted a few things along the border strip like the little tractors.



I used two layers of Dream Puff Wadding between the front and back layers. It made the quilted animals all nice and puffy.



I made the binding strip using my fantastic 1-inch Clover Bias Tape Maker (love it!) and this tutorial at Posie Gets Cozey helped me sort out my mitred corners when I was sewing on the binding.

This playmat has made me more open to the idea of quilting and I think I might try making a quilt from a fabric jelly roll some time this year.

Hope you're having a GREAT day, friends.