Baby Clothes Quilts

I decided I wanted to try and reuse as much of my son's old clothing as I could, and looked into ideas for turning them into quilts or blankets. There are a lot of cute ideas and examples out there!

I had never quilted before, so it took a very long time to make my first quilt, even though it is a very small "lovey" quilt. For the first quilt, I used all the clothing from my son's newborn layette set.

 

Monkeys!! I used soft minky fabric for the backing and wrapped it around to use as a border. For the quilting, I attempted to "stitch the ditch", as I read it was easiest, but I had a really hard time keeping the stitching even and straight. Oh well, I'm not such a stickler for perfection! 

Perfect size to sit and read a book, or snuggle and drag around the house.

After the first quilt was finished, I started right away on the second! None of his other outgrown clothes have a theme to them, so I decided on a random style quilt, using squares of various sizes from 1 to 8 inches, then put them together randomly in 8 inch wide strips (and a 4 inch strip in the center).

It is very random and fun! I cut out the parts of his clothing that had pictures, patterns, or pockets. This quilt has a lot of pockets! This is now my son's favorite blanket, and it is a perfect size for a toddler bed. He likes to sit and point to all the pictures, and put little toys in the pockets.

It was difficult to decide on border and backing fabrics, because there is so much randomness and colors. I finally decided on stripes with dull colors, because it looked good with the denim in the quilt, and puppy fabric on a dark denim blue color for the backing. All the other fabric options were way too bright and overpowered the well worn clothing fabric on the front of the quilt. I machine-tied this quilt. Very fun!

I'd like to get started on the next one, I hope to make a twin size quilt, probably in the same random style as the last one. But he is now a toddler, and therefore isn't growing out of his clothes as quickly as he was! So it may be a while before the next baby clothes quilt!