The Idea
Some years ago, when our first grandchild was born, I wanted to make him something special. I decided to design and make him a patchwork play quilt as something that he could use straight away. I hoped it could be shared and used by other grandchildren. And maybe even last into future generations!
Early play times on what was planned as the reverse of the quilt.
The Process
I decided to make the two sides different but with a linked theme (animals). I also wanted to include several different play ideas.
In a rare diversion for me at the time, I made this quilt with commercial fabrics as opposed to dyeing my own from scratch. I wanted it to be colourful with a lot of detailed interest, so this was the best option.
The quilt is about 1200mm square.
For the “front” of the patchwork play quilt I made 4 log cabins from a jelly roll of farmyard patterns with 4 animal pictures cut from a different piece of fabric and pieced together in the centre of each log cabin.
I placed the animal pictures in four different directions so the quilt was more versatile as a play area.
I joined the log cabins with a border of yellow fabric.
With the left over pieces of fabric that I had used for the centres of the log cabins, I made 12 little soft shapes, each with a rattle, bell or squeaker inside and filled with wadding. Just the right size for little hands to grab, shake and squeeze.
For the “back” of the quilt, I cut some letters, numbers and animals from coloured cotton fabric and appliqued them onto the quilt with free machine stitching.
Again, I had plenty of the fabrics left over, so I made some additional animals. I used Decovil 1 to stiffen them and put a different coloured fabric on each side.
These then added a colour matching and shape matching element to the counting game provided on the stitched quilt
The finished quilt
