Sunday, October 2, 2016

Quick receiving blanket


Last year I did some experimentation with using fleece as quilt backing. While I really like the soft fuzziness of fleece, it's kind of a pain to quilt. It's stretchy and drags against the sewing machine bed quite differently than quilting cotton. I didn't love sewing with it, so I stopped buying fleece.

I had one backing-sized piece of soft pink fleece left, and it kicked around my small sewing studio for many months. Because it was just the one piece, it didn't have a proper place to be put away and it's fairly bulky. Yesterday I'd had enough of moving it out of the way AGAIN and decided to just use it and get rid of it.

This sweet panel seemed like a good match for the pink, so I sewed them right sides together, pillow case style, then turned it right sides out and edge stitched it. I then did some minimal, free motion quilting around the flowered border and the outline of the tree. I also outlined each butterfly, so on the back you see a simple tree with butterflies in and around it. An easy, quick project to not stress my shoulder too much.


It ended up being very soft, and is a good size for a receiving blanket, about 36"x42". Project Linus distributes all sorts of blankets for children, not just quilts, so this will be useful to them. Win-win!

Do you ever sew something just to get rid of the fabric?

3 comments:

  1. That turned out so cute Louise! Fleece is a interesting fabric to work with. I made appliqued quilts for both grandchildren and backed them with fleece...not too bad but I wouldn't want to do it very often. The good thing is that they have soft, cuddly quilts that are really warm for winter.

    Recently, I have been using what fabric I have at hand to do projects. They have all turned out pretty well but I'm not sure they would have been the fabric of choice if I had all of my stash available.

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  2. Perfect solution for using up that length of fleece! Well done! XO

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  3. This is a perfect little girl's quilt! I have taken to using flannel on the back of baby quilts. I find that it gives them a little of the softer feel without the stretch. I love outline quilting like that too!

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