First Quilt - Baby Noah's Art Quilt

A while ago (longer than I care to admit), I bought a baby quilt kit in hopes that it would an easy way to make my first quilt. I got the kit from Walmart, which is Noah's Ark themed, I thought it made a good gender neutral quilt, plus I really liked the material it came with.  I forgot to take a picture of all the material, but it came with some different kinds of material, specifically normal cotton, flannel and this soft plush material.  The plush material feels so nice, however it is very difficult to work with.  It gets everywhere when you cut it and it's hard to pin to the other material to sew because it just slides all over the place. However, I got it to work, so that's the main thing!

Here is some of the cut plush material.

Here is the piece of fabric for the center panel of the quilt.  Most of the time while I was working on the quilt I was afraid that I would mess it up, I tried to be careful and measure things like 5 time, but I still was able to make mistakes!  You will see later on, but I did make a mistake in cutting the center panel, a one inch mistake, however I was able to fix it by sewing some of what I cut back on and cutting it to the correct size.

The rulers I have were not quite long enough to cut the long rectangle pieces, so I had to improvise.  Luckily a have a couple of rules which were able to help out!

After these rectangle pieces, there were a number of square pieces to cut out.  Luckily I have a square ruler set which had the exact size I needed for the squares which made the job a lot easier.  I was able to cut them up quickly and then sewed them together pretty quickly too, using a tip from my sister-in-law about guiding them all through at once, so that I save time and thread.  Here they are sewn together in strips:

Isn't the animal pattern cute?

After putting the squares together, I attached them to the center panel with the rectangle pieces around it.  This made for the front of my quilt.  I was pretty excited at this point because I could see it coming together.

Once I got this done, it took me quite a while to get the rest of the quilt finished.  Part of that is because I changed how the backing was supposed to be attached.  The pattern says to attached the backing on as if you were making a pillow, but after talking to my sister-in-law, we decided that would be a pretty light duty quilt.  Instead, I decided that I would put batting in the middle and then create a binding for it.  Once I bought the extra material, it took a while for me to get going on it again.  I think a large part was that I was afraid to mess it up, but finally I just decided that if I didn't do it, I would never complete the thing.  So after researching online and help from my sister-in-law, I finally got to completing the thing.

After attaching the front, back and batting, I quilted it together in just straight lines, trying my best to follow the lines with the squares.  The lines aren't the straightest, however I think that they are not too bad considering that I was doing them free hand.

Close up of my fix for the center and of the wiggly lines!

After this, I prepared the binding. I found a very helpful Youtube video which showed me how to make my own binding from scrap material (or in my case, new material just for the job!).  I cut, ironed and sewed the stripes for the binding together pretty quickly.  I found that preparing the binding was quite easier than I had suspected, which was nice.  Here are a couple pictures of the process.

I ironed the pieces in half, to make a double binding, which was
good because the material I had is pretty thin.

I sewed the strips together on an angle in order to get them to
lie flat together...

...then I cut the excess material off.

Voila!  A nice bind (it became flat once I
ironed it!)

Once the binding was ready, I attached and sewed it to the quilt.  I had a little trouble with that because I was trying to free hand a 1/4 inch seam, based on what the woman in the Youtube video told me, despite having a 1/4 inch seam foot which makes sewing a 1/4 inch seam a breeze.  About half way through I gave up and switched the foot and it because 10x easier to sew the binding on!

After the binding was attached on the front, I watched a couple more Youtube videos on how to hand stitch the binding to the back and began that process.  I found that it was a little tedious because it takes a lot longer and I had to be hunched over it, so it took me about a week to do as I could only do so much at a time.  I found that my stitches weren't as tight as the ones in the videos I watched, so I think I make have to fix it once it has been used for a bit, but we will see.  All in all, I think it came together pretty well for my first quilt.  Here is the finished product!