Baby Quilt

Perhaps oddly for my age, I have very few close friends who have kids. When someone I'm close to gets pregnant, I enter a period of stunned amazement. I spent the next few days repeating to anyone nearby, "She's having a baby. There's a human growing in her uterus." It's amazing to me that the entire human race doesn't spend much of its time saying this. I mean, really, being pregnant is crazy and awesome. It's growing a human in your uterus. Wow.

Once the shock recedes a bit, I have an uncontrollable urge to make things for the family. That woman is making a human. The least I can do is make some cute knitwear.

While I'm firmly in the camp for gender equality, and while I recognize that a lot of the time this means not treating males as stupid Neanderthals the way the advertising world seems to, I'm all about the mom in these cases. It's not that the fathers are unimportant. It's that the woman is growing a human in her uterus. 

Holly and I had talked about what knitwear she wanted for the new baby. I was happy, happy, happy to do that, but I felt the urge to make her something she wouldn't know about.

One of my sisters has made baby quilts, and I have that Epic Quirky Quilt that I'm working on for myself, so I decided I'd make a baby quilt. Then I immediately called my mother, made her do math with me on the phone, and begged her to come help me. She did.

This is a simple block quilt. It wasn't simple for me though. My sewing skills are very, very limited. It's definitely not perfect, but I don't think it will fall apart and anyone who examines the seams deserves to find them flawed.

I tied it with white wool in the hopes that it will continue to felt during washing and drying, holding the quilt's layers more securely together.

Besides having a surprise gift for Holly, making this quilt had another benefit. I stopped being so afraid of the Epic Quirky Quilt. I've started working on it again, and I'm trying very, very hard to enjoy the process and not think about how long it's going to take me to sew together a bajillion little squares.

I haven't succeeded in that yet, but I still have hope.