Husker Play Square

This little baby quilt may be one of my favorites, although I think I say that after finishing every baby quilt! This is for a co-worker and her 4 1/2 month old; her little man is such a cutie, and very active! He is constantly wiggling, and almost always smiling. Daddy works in the athletic department for UNL, and Mommy works with me as a toddler teacher. Mom asked for a Husker taggie after returning from maternity leave, but I had bigger plans in mind: I have been meaning to make this quilt for months, and finally got around to it.
I made this quilt using my same pattern I did for this co-worker's quilt. With this quilt though, I varied the sizes of the squares even more, which I think looks even better. I used two different licensed Husker fabrics, one with Lil' Red (I love him!)

....and one with the Nebraska N in red and black.

 Then I found coordinating red, black and white fabrics to go with it.

 My favorite being this number fabric! What a great way for this little man to learn his numerals!

 I did two minky squares in red,

 and one white square scraped together with left over white minky dot fabric.

I didn't quilt the white dot fabric, and because all the other fabrics were quilted and shrunk in the wash, this dot fabric did not and is puffy and great to touch and pull at. For the back I used a red fabric with tiny little white dots, a great contrast to the white thread I used for the quilting. I used Kona red for the binding, which stands out from the dots on the back.

I love the contrast in the white and black, along with the red. Too bad I hadn't finished this sooner, it would have been great for a newborn! The fabrics I picked have a lot of different textures and prints to them, stripes, dots as well as the numbers. The ribbons do too; dots, argyle, smooth, bumpy and shiny, lots of textures to touch during tummy time.

I plan to make many more quilts using these fabrics, a student teacher has requested that I make her a Husker quilt, which would be my first paying customer. :) I also want to make a few of these baby quilts for etsy....when I find time.

For now, I am relaxing on my last evening of summer, my first class is at 2:00 tomorrow. Followed by a Tuesday morning class and Wednesday night class. Hopefully these classes won't be too stressful with work and my internship. Only 3 semesters and one online summer class to go, graduation is getting closer!!!

What I learned from making this quilt:
When using the soft minky fabric, stabilizer is a MUST! I have used this soft cuddly fabric on almost every baby quilt I have made, and every time I get frustrated. This time around, one of my squares ended up crooked and when I quilted it the minky fabric stretched causing wrinkles in the white sashing. Luckily when I washed and dried it, the wrinkles blended in with the rest of the crinkles, and you don't notice it. But for next time and I am definitely using fusible interfacing! Maybe it will take away some of the swearing that comes with using minky fabric too. :)