Thursday, June 12, 2014
Baby Quilts for Grandma
What would Grandma want for Christmas? Why baby quilts, of course -- Grandma has as many babies as everyone else, put together!
Janet, my mother-in-law, has more than fifty grandchildren; she is now in the Great-Grandma business. Most years, my Christmas gifts to her have been stashes of playthings for her Grandma house: in years past, I have given bins of Duplo Lego sets, vintage dolls revitalized with sets of handmade dresses, and scores of dress-up clothes (a perennial favorite). This year, I noticed that her baby quilts are getting a little threadbare, so I began working on a couple in fabrics that I knew she would like. They were not completed until after the new year, but she said she didn't mind.
When their children were young, my in-laws spent eleven years in Hawaii; six of their eleven children were born during these years. Ten years ago, just before retiring, my father-in-law did an exchange and worked for a year at BYU-Hawaii, where he had worked before. Their old friends were delighted to see them! While they were there, my husband and I paid them a visit. The island was rained out that week, but I gave Janet some money and she later brought back these fabric strips for me to put in a quilt.
They were a little irregularly-shaped, so they stayed in my stash until this year's need. The design for this baby quilt was the solution to the problem of how to waste as little as possible.
Janet loves batik fabrics and our shared favorite color is a beautiful turquoise hue. This swirled batik seemed to soften the bright Hawaiian prints for a baby quilt. Both quilts share a similar flannel back and are bound with the same swirled batik.
The second quilt was an assortment of bright batiks, cut into squares. Janet has a quilt on the wall in her study that she made of a rainbow of similarly assorted brights, so I took my cue from that. She seemed to like the quilts and has temporarily put them on display on her front room couches. They are machine quilted, which I figured would hold them together well through multiple washings.
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