Car Seat Quilts

A close friend of mine and my sister-in-law were both due to have their second babies this summer. I love when other people have babies because it gives me an excess to work on simple, fast and really cute projects without actually having to have the baby.

It’s been a while since I made my last quilt, so two new babies was a great excuse to try a new pattern. After going over my Pintrest boards I found two different pins I had been wanting to try. The first project was this Car Seat Quilt.

I used the dimensions and basic directions from this tutorial to create my own car seat quilt from that. Although the pattern on this tutorial was cute I wanted to do something a little different.

I also had pinned this Zig-Zag Quilt Pattern a while ago as well and had been waiting for an excuse to try it. (Update: Unfortunately I don’t think this link works anymore and I can no longer find the tutorial I used.)

Obviously I had to make some size alterations to the pattern to make it mini sized but once it was complete it ended up being close to the size as the Car Seat Quilt Pattern.

So enough talk, here’s the quilt top after I had sewn all the blocks together.

If I remember correctly I cut the blocks into 3.5″ x 3.5″ squares for easy cutting and math. I choose grey and two other colors for each quilt. The one shown above is blue and green and the other is green and yellow.

The next step was to lay the quilt top out flat and trim it into a rectangle. I was careful to trim the quilt so that I would still have a 1/4″ seam allowance and my binding wouldn’t cut off any points.

It’s looking better already.

Up next I stretched the backing laid the batting on top and then finished it off with top and pinned all the layers together. I choose a different Winnie-the-Pooh fabric for the backing on each quilt and I used Warm and White for the batting. I love using Warm and White for all my quilts since not only is it warm, it’s easy to work with and it makes the finished project look great. When I can get it on sale or use a coupon the cost is totally worth it.

I don’t usually, but this time I chose to machine quilt the layers. I followed the zig zags and just stitched in the ditch. As usual when I machine quilts, these quilts became stretched and a little off square by the time they were done. Although, since they are so small it didn’t affect them too much. In the end I’m glad I went with the machine quilting. That way there is nothing to distract from the pattern, plus the chevron pattern shows up on the back which is a great detail.

The last step was to attach the ties. I placed them in the locations from the car seat tutorial and then I sewed on the biding and finished it off by hand sewing the binding down on the back side.

The car seat quilts ended up being a simple project that took much less time than a full size quilt. It was a nice excuse to get creative and make something different. Plus, they turned out pretty cute if I do say so my self . Since I don’t actually have a baby and thus no car seat I couldn’t take any shots of the quilts on the car seat.