WIP Wednesday: I-spy baby quilt

Lisa at FreshStash always has the most adorable bundles of fabrics and a great selection of novelty prints. She recently started selling packs of 150 3" squares - perfect for I-spy quilts! They were too adorable for me to pass up. I bought a pack and added to it from my own stash of novelty and solid fabrics. I got a little carried away and ended up with 260 squares!

I have enough squares to make 2 baby quilts. Each one will have a 10 square x 13 square (25" x 32.5") I-spy center section. For this first quilt I added a 1" semi-solid border and a 5" neutral print border. I have plans for an orange and aqua binding.

I used a new (to me) basting technique to make the quilt sandwich. I used #8 pearl cotton to baste the quilt using this method. Here's the whole quilt top:

 

A close-up of the front:



And the back:



This method takes just slightly longer than pin-basting (for me) but I like this so much better - I just clip the threads as I quilt a section, which is a lot faster than unclipping safety pins. Plus, every time I pin-baste I think I lose about 10% of my safety pins and that gets expensive. I now only have enough safety pins left to baste one baby quilt at a time. I've used spray-baste for a couple quilts recently and I liked it, but this method is way cheaper than spray baste, too. I think this will be my new default basting method from now on!