Vintage-Inspired, Paper-Pieced Baby Quilt

There’s something comforting about traditional, vintage quilts. Here’s a modern take on a vintage pattern, using bright fabrics and quilting designs, perfect for a baby quilt!

Stats

Size: 48″ x 48″, 500 pieces of fabric
Time: ~80hrs of work
Cost: ~$250

Materials

Cut Glass pattern in Vintage Quilt Revival

Soft minky fabric backing and material by Shannon Fabrics

Odif 505 temporary spray adhesive

Odif Usa 505 Spray and Fix Temporary Fabric Adhesive, 14.7oz

~~$24.40 ($1.97 / Ounce)~~ $22.99 ($1.85 / Ounce) (as of January 5, 2025 20:20 GMT +00:00 – )

Temporary, repositionable, fabric adhesive used to temporarily bond fabric Odorless, colorless, no m… read more

Newsprint paper

School Smart Newsprint Drawing Paper, 30 lb, 6 x 9 Inches, 500 Sheets, White – 085590

$12.87 ($0.03 / Count) (as of January 5, 2025 20:20 GMT +00:00 – )

Perfect for use with pencils, crayons, markers and pastels Off-white hue adds warm appeal, making it… read more

Poly-cotton blend batting or wool batting

Quilter’s Dream 80/20, White, Select Loft Batting – Throw Size 60″X60″ Quilter’s Dream

$23.88 (as of January 5, 2025 20:20 GMT +00:00 – )

80% Cotton, 20% Poly, White Color, Throw Size 60"X60", Select – Mid Loft. No resins, scrim or binder… read more

Quilters Dream Wool Throw Size 60″ X 60″

~~$29.64~~ $29.20 (as of January 5, 2025 20:19 GMT +00:00 – )

Dream Wool is Exceptionally Durable, Rich and Resilient Ensuring that Your Quilts will be Treasured … read more

Paper piecing

The quilt is made using a foundation paper piecing technique. Paper piecing allows you to create intricate seams and angles that you wouldn’t be able to with normal sewing.

You can create some really crazy designs with paper piecing, from animals to Iron Man. There’s numerous tutorials out there for paper piecing.

I highly suggest you use thin newsprint paper rather than white printer paper. You’ll be sewing through the paper and will need to rip the paper away later–it’s much easier with thin paper, and much cheaper!

The first seam. Put the green fabric in the middle, overlapping the straight line by at least 1/4″.

Put the yellow fabric underneath. Note it’s backwards/upside-down from what you’d expect. Do it a couple times and it’ll get more intuitive.

Green-yellow seam from the back.

Flip back “upright” and sew along line

Flip seam over and iron.

Green-orange seam.

Repeat for the other seam. Green-orange seam after sewing and pressing.

Iron and repeat many, many times

Trim away excess material.

Rip paper off.

Repeat hundreds of times.

When done with all the paper pieced sections, start sewing them together into blocks.

Creating the Quilt Sandwich

After completing the 64 quarter-blocks, I laid them out to randomize the green-orange-yellow and to place the plum and black blocks. Sew all those together.

Use 505 spray adhesive one row at a time to adhere the top to batting. This is to keep the quilt layers in place until you quilt it with permanent stitching.

Odif Usa 505 Spray and Fix Temporary Fabric Adhesive, 14.7oz

~~$24.40 ($1.97 / Ounce)~~ $22.99 ($1.85 / Ounce) (as of January 5, 2025 20:20 GMT +00:00 – )

Temporary, repositionable, fabric adhesive used to temporarily bond fabric Odorless, colorless, no m… read more

Now you have a very thick quilt sandwich.

The Quilting

This quilt was really hard since it was so thick. I normally use wool or cotton batting, but wanted something thicker to showcase the quilting, so I went with a poly-cotton blend. Plus with the cuddly fabric, I got pumped after a couple minutes of shoving it through the machine. It was very hard to make even stitches and curves. The thickest parts where the star points touch had 24 layers of fabric in the seam + batting + cuddly fabric.

The Binding

I used cuddly fabric for the binding for the first time. It took quite a bit of experimenting to finally settle on this method. This is a good tutorial for normal binding using woven quilting fabric, but cuddly fabric is stretchy and comparatively thick.