Quilts for my Grandbabies

Andrea R Huelsenbeck

Jun 10

On Valentine's Day this year, our daughter Erin and her husband Dave ushered our very first granddaughters into the world. Yes, twin girls.

And although I'd planned and bought fabric and started on them before the birth, I didn't get them finished until this past Tuesday.

Erin and Dave decorated the nursery around a bee theme. (Erin loves bees!) They painted the room yellow and gray. I decided to use yellow and gray in the quilts, but instead of focusing on bees, I wanted to include a variety of animals. I'm envisioning the girls in the future spending many happy hours identifying and talking about the animals on their quilts.

I chose several different fabrics with animals on them, and fussy-cut 4 1/2-inch square portraits; then I stitched 1 1/2-inch strips of either gray or yellow fabric to each side as a "frame."

Then came the task of arranging the blocks. The two quilts are not identical, but very similar.

The original plan was to just join all the blocks and not use borders. But the quilts had an unfinished look, so I opted for a gray border inside a yellow one. Finally, the tops were finished.

I quilted them on my Moxie using the Flutterbys pattern (butterflies with a loopy flight path). I used a light gray thread on the top and yellow thread on the bottom, so the quilting would blend into the fabrics and not obscure the animal pictures.

I had originally planned to self-bind the quilts by folding the backing to the front. However, because I had added the two borders, there wasn't enough backing fabric to turn to the sides. In fact, I only had enough leftover backing to bind one of the quilts; I had barely enough of the yellow fabric to bind the second one.