Baby Quilts "As You Like It"

Baby boy twin's quilt "As You Like It" pattern Baby girl twin's quilt

Last winter there was a rash of pregnancies among our family and friends so I decided to try my hand at baby quilts. One of our nieces was expecting twins so I was planning on making at least two for her and a close friend of my daughter's was also expecting.

I flipped through my quilting magazines and after much contemplation I decided on a quilt called "As You Like It" from the Better Home and Gardens Creative Collection, Fast and Fabulous Quilting Ideas magazine June 2008 edition.

I used 3 fabrics for each quilt. The first had an animal ark print, green dotted print and a soft yellow with little lambs on it.

I used the same animal ark fabric for the back and the same green dotted one for the binding around the edge once it was all done.

This one was the experimental one. I "fussy cut" (meaning individually cut each one out) 16 of the arks in squares according to directions and made up a number of blocks with the animal arks in the centre. TheN I measured them, but they were all a bit off, a bit too small, so I took them apart ( like I said I've become good buds with my seam ripper...) and tried resewing them with seams a tiny bit shy of 1/4 inch but it was still hit and miss. Then I decided to increase

the size of the fussy cut arks in the block and try again. The individual blocks looked fine, but once I sewed then together with surrounding blocks the seam lines didn't really work out to make the pinwheel pattern...

Back to the drawing board! Next I increased the size of the squares from 2 7/8 to 3 inches and sewed them together with the original fussy cut arks and that was pretty much foolproof! It gave me a tiny bit of leeway to trim each block to 4 inches. I liked how the green stars jump out at you in this little quilt.

The other twin's quilt was made from a combination of the animal ark fussy cut blocks together with a red and white striped fabric with tiny red hearts and a medium green fabric with tiny red and white flowers on it. In this quilt the red and white pinwheels really stand out more than the stars. I used the same animal ark fabric for the back and the trim around the quilt was the green fabric.

These two baby quilts were complete in january and February 2009.

I liked this pattern and it was easy to make now that I had ironed the bugs out, so I decided to use the same pattern but completely different fabric for baby quilt #3.