Baby Quilts: Perfect for Newborns

There is nothing more exciting than the arrival of a new baby. And sometimes quilters want to mark a special occasion like that with a quilt. So a few months ago, my very first grandbaby was expected and I wanted to give him something to be wrapped up in a quilter's love, but I thought that a regular quilt was maybe a little bit too big and bulky. So I came up with an idea that I'll show you today that I call better quilts for newborns. So here on the table, I have a completed one of what we'll be doing today. And you can see the idea is that it's pieced very, very simply. I chose a color scheme that would appeal to a young mom. This one was made for a little boy. And I just coordinated fabrics, kept the piecing super simple. And you'll see that these little quilts have no batting. So I use flannel on the back. I keep the piecing very simple on the front and do just a couple of other little things to help this go smoothly. So that's the idea of a better quilt for newborns. Here's another example of one that's ready to be layered up and turned. This one, again, you can see the piecing is just very simple. I just did nine eight-inch pinwheels and set it with three-inch sashing. So, you know that these are not meant to be heirloom quilts. They're kinda down and dirty pieces for a little baby. You know they'll be washed a lot and used, sometimes strenuously. So you don't wanna put tons of time into the quilting. You just wanna keep it simple as far as the piecing goes. So, those are two examples and now I'd like to show you the steps for how you get to the end of a better quilt for a newborn. So let's walk through the steps to get you to a better quilt for a newborn. At this point, you've pieced a very simple top using prewashed fabric and you've purchased some flannel for the back of the quilt. And these little quilts have no batting, so you don't need to worry about that. But you definitely wanna prewash the flannel, as well as the fabric for the top, just because with a new baby, you just don't know quite what chemicals might be on that fabric or how and where it's been stored. So I would just feel better if I knew that it was clean. So, for my samples today, we'll pretend that this is your very simple pieced top, little umbrella fabric. And so the top is here, the prewashed flannel is here, and what you're gonna do is layer them with the right sides together. And then you'll want to cut the flannel just a little bit larger than the, just a little bit larger than the fabric. So, you don't have to be too worried about it. You don't have to leave a lot of extra, just a little bit is enough. So you'll layer it up. Again, the right sides are together. And you wanna take it to your sewing machine and you'll sew all the way around using, I usually use about 3/8 to 1/2 an inch for a seam allowance. And on one side, I'll want to leave an opening because this'll be turned right sides out a little bit later. And here at the opening, you can see that I've backstitched just a little bit, and that will be my friend later. So I've sewn all the way around and now I want to get my scissors out again and I wanna cut a little more closely to the fabric like so. Cut along each edge and you could use a rotary cutter to do this if you wanted. And then in the corner, in the corner, you want to take off just a little bit. You don't wanna go clear to that point, but you wanna take off just a little bit to help eliminate bulk. So let's try it again on this corner so you can see. Get most of it off and then I would take off, I would leave about 1/8 of an inch or a little bit more right there on that diagonal. So that just helps eliminate some of the bulk in the corners. So I'll go ahead and cut off all the sides and trim all the corners. When I get to this part that has the opening, I wanna come out a little bit. I wanna leave a little extra. You don't wanna cut too close right there. And then I'll just finish up. So we're all trimmed now and we're ready to turn it right sides out. So I can just stick my hand right in here, get ahold, and turn it. Now you'll be working with a quilt that's a little bit larger, usually somewhere around 36 inches is good. 36 to 40 is about the right size for a newborn. So push the corners out a little bit with my fingers and then I usually take a tool of some kind just to help me get those corners out a little bit. This end of this plastic clover tool works pretty well. The best tool by far is the orange stick from a manicure. So it's plenty long and it's not so much that I wanna poke the corners out as it is that I want to kinda slide the edges even. Let's go around to the next corner. So I wanna kinda slide those edges so that corner is, doesn't have to be really pointed, but you want it to look nice. So I would do that to all four corners. So here you can see I've got the whole thing turned, the corners pushed out nicely. And remember we left that extra at the opening. So here you can see why that's my friend. Because I need to turn this edge under just so, and that little extra just helps things go much more smoothly right there. So I want to turn those under. I usually take it to the sewing machine and just give it a light press and put a couple of pins there. And then I'll sew that opening shut. Here, you can see that I've sewn the opening shut and I actually didn't catch the backing just perfectly on my first try, so I just made another pass, which is totally fine. Because remember, this is not an heirloom quilt. This is something that is just gonna wrap the baby in love while he's really little. So a little thing like that is not anything to worry about. The other thing I do is to just put in very, very minimal quilting to hold the layers together. Here you can see that I've just put in two lines, straight quilting right across here. Because there's no batting, that's all the quilting you need. The reason that we're always worried about how close the quilting needs to be on a regular quilt is because we don't want the batting to shift as the quilt is used and washed. But with this, that would never happen since there's no batting. So very minimal quilting does the trick here. So I've put in my very minimal quilting, and then the last thing I do is I usually take a walking foot, which looks like this, and you can get these for almost any sewing machine. And they just help the layers to feed evenly under the presser foot. And I would topstitch. You can use matching thread or contrasting thread, whatever you choose, and I just topstitched all the way around here to kinda give the edge a little nicer finished. So you can see on the back, you can kinda see the quilting, just two simple lines. You can see the topstitching. You can just barely see where I closed up the edge. But you can see that how nice and pliable this is for a tiny baby. So it's a very simple idea, but it turns into a really nice thing that a mom can really use for a baby. So going back to our finished quilt, what I love about these the most is that they are so nice for swaddling newborns. Swaddling is when you wrap the baby up tight, kinda like a little mummy, and babies seem to just love that snugness, that coziness. But a quilt with batting doesn't always work real well for swaddling, but this kind of a piece works great. So since you didn't put a ton of work into it, you don't worry about the fact that it's gonna be washed and it's gonna be used harshly sometimes. That's totally fine. One thing that I did, because this didn't take a whole lotta time, for my grandson, I made a set of three swaddling blankets just like this and the piecing on each one was a little bit different. On one, I just did strips like this, a variety of widths, and then on one, I did the pinwheels that you saw earlier, and on one, I just did squares, 4 1/2-inch squares set with 2 1/2-inch sashing. So keep the piecing very simple. The quilting is really minimal. Use that inside out turning method and maybe all the newborns in your life will be happily swaddled from here on out.