Baby Quilt Completed

Sunday I finished the baby quilt I've been working on. Remember all my little sandwiches? Well, the next step was to stitch an X through each one, like so:

Now all my little sandwiches would hold together!

Then, I stitched all the sandwiches into strips, then stitched the strips together. I used a half-inch seam allowance, and just let the seams stick out on the back. Here's what the front looked like:

Here's the back:

After topstitching a half-inch border around the whole thing, I started to fringe all of those seams sticking out:

I fringed all the seams in the quilt as well. My hand is so mad at me after all those little cuts! I found hand muscles I didn't know I had.

The last step was to throw the quilt in the wash on a gentle cycle with Woolite, then put it in the dryer. The idea here was to fluff up all of those seams that I fringed. I pulled this little friend out of the lint tray when I was done:

Here's what it looked like when it was all done!

Here's a weird aside:

I started this quilt on a total impulse. I have no kids, and I didn't have anyone in mind to give this to. I just really liked the fabrics and the idea of making a quilt. This alone was strange, because I have had exactly zero interest in quilting my whole life, and now suddenly I must make this quilt?

Anyway, I started it on March 7th. March 10th I learned that a teacher at my school had adopted a baby - she and her husband had been trying to adopt, and the whole thing came together in three days. The baby was a little boy, and he was born on March 7th - the day I started the quilt.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I just feel so strongly that this quilt was meant for this little baby, and it is en route to him as we speak. Obviously, no one threw the parents a baby shower before his arrival, so I don't know how many items like this the baby has right now. The fact that I started a baby boy's quilt with no idea why and then this all just sort of fell into place... well. I happen to think that's pretty darn cool!