Ready, Set, Go! Challenge with Accuquilt and Island Batik {Baby Quilt Beginnings}

Being an Island Batik Ambassador for the last three years has been an amazing experience with some pretty nice perks (Fabric! Thread! Batting! Connections with new quilters!) and this year Accuquilt has graciously given us a Go! Fabric cutter starter kit (not an affiliate link). So this month, our challenge is to use our cutters and dies to make a baby quilt! 

One of my fellow Ambassadors, Connie, already posted her finished quilt, but her post has a great photo line up of all that came in our starter kits from Accuquilt.

Asking me to make a baby quilt is hardly an imposition for me, since I am *always* making baby quilts. Besides being useful, it's a great way to test out blocks and techniques on a smaller scale.

Since I already have two finished boy quilts ready for gifting, I decided I would make a more girly quilt for this challenge. This is the first time in a while where I don't have a list of baby quilts that I need to make or send -- and now that I've said/written this, it probably means that I'll hear about 3-6 imminent arrivals.

For my fabrics for this challenge, I decided to go with pink, black, and white. My white is the same sprinkles print that I used last month. The black prints are various black and grey prints pulled from my stash builder rolls. I have two different hot pink fabrics pulled -- a paisley print left from my Dashing to the Chapel quilt and some pink from the Check It Out collection.

One of the cool things that came with the starter set from Accuquilt is a Quilt In A Day book from Eleanor Burns, which features lots of classic quilt blocks and the dies you need for each one. I decided to pick two blocks from this book to make a two block quilt -- the blocks I picked are called Depression and Mosaic.

I actually started working on this in March -- I cut the pieces and parts for six Depression blocks to use as leader and ender sewing. This block uses the 4, 5, and 6 dies from the 8" Qube set to make the half square triangles, flying geese, and square in a square units.

I focused on doing each type of unit from start to finish for all six blocks instead of making just one block at a time.

Now I have six blocks completed out of a goal of 25 blocks.

Cutting has long been a favorite part of the quilting process for me, so I don't know if I could give traditional cutting up entirely, but I will say that so far, I really enjoy using the Go! Cutter for specific projects and sizes and that I need to play around more with the dies that I do have!