Baseball Baby Quilts {Applique Bonanza}

Since last I posted about the progress on my baseball baby quilts, I made some creative decisions about what to do for the applique section of the quilts. It also helps that I now know the names!

My final decision was to add just the name to each quilt. With the names being longer, I decided to simplify the applique section. I created my own alphabet templates for this project simply by making a font extremely large in Word (one page per letter!). The tracing was done with the help of the afternoon sun in my bathroom window and I did all of the ironing and trimming while my husband and I listened to Christmas music in the evening last week.

Since the quilt itself has black in the prints, I decided to do the letters in black solid. (I had plenty of navy in my stash but no black so I got a little delayed with that!)

For each quilt, I laid out the letters and approximated the middle of each name; I started adding letters from the middle out (definitely testing my spelling skills) until each letter was added. I probably could have made the letters slightly smaller -- I sort of underestimated how wide these would be!

Then came the machine applique of each letter. This font was a good choice because the letters are simple lines and curves and the corners are nice and sharp!

I used black thread and did a simple small zig-zag stitch around the letters. In a world with unlimited time and thread, I might have outlined one with red and one with blue satin stitching but I really want to get these to the recipients before Christmas. It's rather hard to pick out the stitching with black thread on black fabric, but trust me -- it's there!

Now to decide on backing and start quilting. I plan to use the same backing for both and also plan to use the same quilting motif for both (currently my plan is a meander with stars). One will have a blue binding and one will have a yellow binding. Keeping many of the design elements simple makes it much easier to accomplish two quilts in the time of one -- literally!

Don't forget to enter to win a set of 2.5" Island Batik strips in this post!