A Heart-Stitched Baby Rag Quilt {Tutorial}

I recently made a crib sized rag quilt for a friend's baby shower. It is very similar to this rag quilt that I've blogged about before, except that instead of the usual "x" each square is quilted with a happy little heart. 

Several of the fabrics I used are from the "Seaside Cottage" collection by Heather Mulder Peterson.

To start, you will need to cut 70 seven-inch fabric squares and 35 six-inch squares of quilt batting.

Sandwich a piece of batting between two squares of fabric. 

Pin together and stitch big ugly basting stitches across the whole thing in an "x" pattern.  These stitches are just to hold everything in place for now and will be removed later.

Continue with the rest of the squares and batting until you have 35 basted little fabric sandwiches.

To sew your squares together, place the squares back to back (so, the fabrics you've chosen for the backing will be touching each other and the fabrics you've chosen for the top will be facing out) and stitch about 1/2" from the edge.

You'll have something that looks like this....

Continue sewing the squares together into 5 strips of 7 squares.

And then sew those strips together the same way!  Don't forget to put the back sides together when you sew. If you regularly sew things other than rag quilts this will seem backwards to you since you are so accustomed to putting the right sides of a garment together.  I confess I had to rip out and re-sew a seam or two because I had absentmindedly sewn the strips together wrong!

Sew all the way around the outside edge of the quilt too, 1/2" from the edge.

Next you will take a sharp pair of scissors and a couple episodes of your favourite television series and sit down to snip all of your edges so that your seams fray up nicely.  Be careful not to cut any stitches!

Cut a cute little heart from a piece of cardboard and use it to trace a heart shape in the middle of each square.

And quilt along your pencil lines.  Here is a youtube video showing you how to do a quilting stitch.

Remove your big ugly basting stitches and you're done!

 

I gave it a wash and a dry in the dryer to fluff up the raggy edges a little bit and remove my pencil lines.  And because it was a gift I put a few drops of lavender essential oil on my wool dryer balls when I dried it so that it would smell super nice.  

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