I reckon the fabric for this very long-standing work in progress goes back around four years. When I cut out my first drunkards path quilt (below) I was left with lots of smaller drunkard path pieces. I couldn’t bear to throw them away so they just got stuck in a project bag and put in a drawer.

When rooting around for an empty project bag for some Siblings Together blocks that were coming in thick and fast  I decided It was probably easier to make up the contents of one of the bags rather than make a new project bag.

One of the great things about baby quilts is that they are so very quick to make and finish.  And furthermore they seem to be universally liked as a gift, something I guess to do with the nesting instinct of a new mother.

Yes it really was that messy!

It is perfect  quilt to give to Project Linus as it’s too small for Siblings Together and I know they actively collect for neonatal and paediatric wards. I made a similar cot quilt for them a year or so ago based on the Hungry Caterpiller story.

I don’t know what the general view of the use of baby quilts where you live but here  in the UK the advice is not to use a quilt as a bed covering until the baby is 12 months for fear of cot death. This is on the basis that the baby may get too warm and babies that young can’t regulate their own temperature.

I remember being given a leaflet as I went home with the first of my premature twins with strict instructions that the room temperature had to be around 60°F with no more than two blankets covering them.  I had the thermometre ready to check the temperature and the requisite number of blankets and carefully monitored both for fear that any breach would lead to his instant death. I did worry as I tucked myself up in my 10 tog duvet in the same room and next to his cot that I would have been freezing with just two blankets but so fearful was I that I’d get it wrong I stuck to the leaflet.  Needless to say when the midwife came round the next day she discovered a baby with a  temperature that was so low he was on the verge of hypothermia and had to be rushed off to hospital to be heated up. I have been sceptical about health advice from the NHS ever since and you can see he was very warmly wrapped thereafter!

Interestingly that same child, now 16, always sleeps with his window wide open in all weathers.  The neighbours, who can see his window from their house, were laughing that even when we had snowfall last Spring they could see it accumulating on his open window. So maybe it has had a lifetime effect!

Now whenever I gift a baby quilt to a friend I always tell them what the theoretical advice is and then let them make their own decisions but after telling them my own salutary tale…