A Winnie the Pooh quilt

A friend of mine had a baby boy recently and she loves Winnie the Pooh so it seemed an obvious choice of fabric for a cot quilt. I love making cot quilts for new babies and over time I have learnt to simplify my designs for the quilts so that I manage to get the quilts finished sometime before the baby's first birthday!

This cot shows one of my favourite ways of getting lots of quick detail into a cot quilt, which is starting with a fabric panel that is supposed to be sewn into a book. I measured the "book pages" on the panel and designed my quilt around those dimensions. I bought more Pooh bear fabric for the little squares to go with the book panel.

I stitched the yellow and green check fabric in strips around each panel before stitching it all together with the Pooh bear squares and white sashing. I felt the design looked a little plain when I had sewn all the panels together and I had a couple of panels left with some characters on so I appliqued Winnie the Pooh with his umbrella near the bottom of the quilt and Tigger peeking out near the top.

Then it came to the quilting and I used my walking foot to quilt horizontal and vertical lines and either side of the brown border around each picture. I then used my regular machine foot with a quilting guide to quilt the lines onto the white sashing and around the applique characters. I finally changed the machine foot again for a darning foot and did some free machine embroidery around each cloud that appeared in the pictures.

For the back of the quilt I used some lovely soft flannel ( flannelette)  with more Pooh bears on - perfect for a baby quilt.

I completed most of the quilt before the baby was born as I had a plan to sew pink or blue binding around the edge after we knew baby was a boy or girl - as you can see I went for blue!