Baby Quilts

This is an ongoing series of functional quilts for babies and children, made as gifts or by commission. All quilts are made with salvaged or repurposed fabrics, machine pieced, and hand quilted.

BABY ELAIA QUILT
salvaged, repurposed, & hand-dyed fabrics, 32"x40", 2023

This is the first quilt I’ve ever made for a baby in my own community — baby Elaia, born in July, a Cancer sun like myself. The pattern is a variation on the sunflower block, as requested by his Mama. The fabrics are repurposed bed sheets, and the backing fabric is pale green flannel (also repurposed.) Bed sheets are great raw material for me, because they provide fairly large pieces of fabric to work with, but an added benefit is that they have been softened by use.

THE SUNFLOWER QUILT
salvaged, repurposed, & hand-dyed fabrics, 36"x48", 2023

This pattern was inspired by the quilt block used for the Dogwood Village quilt project. It’s a traditional star block, but I think it looks more like a flower.

Many of the fabrics are salvaged bed sheets or pillowcases. There are also scrap and remnant fabrics from my collection and a few hand dyed pieces: osage orange, walnut, and indigo dyes.

The interior ‘batting’ is actually a worn, knit bed sheet, which makes this a fairly lightweight, or ‘summer weight’ quilt.

The stitching pattern was adapted from the previous tiny quilt “Human Chain.”

I envisioned this as the first in a series of baby quilts, though now I see that a small quilt can be quite versatile. It can be a tapestry, an artwork, a throw, and child’s quilt, a meditation shawl…