Comfort Blanket

This is going to be a bad idea, I can just tell - getting into quilting that is. I wanted to make a little blanket for Alex to cuddle and thought I'd try my hand at quilting one. I had some flannelette that I thought would be cuddly and some cotton that was just sitting around.

After looking at lots of blogs I decided to do an hourglass pattern, though I can't remember where I saw one like it.

I cut out a whole lot of triangles with the 2 even sides measuring 3 inches. Ended up being 12 of each of the flannelette and 24 of the contrasting cotton. This would yield 12 squares.

First let me say that this is my first quilting project and I do not profess to know anything about quilting so sorry if I do something wrong.

I chain stitched into pairs one of the flannelette with one of the cotton triangles

All the seams were pressed in one direction

Then I laid the bigger triangles out to figure out how I wanted the pattern to look.

I decided on the first one and set about chain stitching the triangles together into squares, and then stitching the squares together.

This is what I got:

I don't think it's too bad for a first go. Next step, cut out the baking material and the batting and pin together.

I thought I'd go all out and try my hand at free motion quilting. I spent a lot of time researching this on other blogs and on You Tube. They all suggested doing lots of trial ones but I don't have the time or the money/material to do this. I figured this is for a baby and he isn't going to care what it's like so..... this is my first try!

Clearly there are mistakes (you can see the bunched cotton on the back) and the stitch length is all over the place but I'm rather happy with how it went for a first try.

In order to make this a bit harder for myself I wanted to do the binding with satin to make it nice to touch. I used this blog to do it.

And the finished project looks like this:

After all that it hasn't really worked out to be what I had hoped which was a cuddly blanket. It is a bit small so doesn't scrunch up very well. I'll keep it around and it may be of some use, but for a snuggle blanket I think I'll try something else.