Easy applique/quilting for a baby floor mat

[Twigletpiglet]

I am planning to make a baby quilt/floor mat type thing for a friend's baby but am not sure really how to do it. I don't want to do a patchwork quilt as I think it will take me much too long - the the baby is due now!. Also, I've got a large piece of patterned fabric that I'd like to use and it looks lovely without me cutting it up into pieces. I'm planning to applique some shapes onto it as well - I'm reasonably confident doing machine applique. However, I do want the mat to have the thickness of a quilt with batting in it, so I will need to use quilting techniques. Should I applique onto my top fabric first, and then make the quilt sandwich and use some kind of straight stitching? But how would that work with my appliqued shapes - it might look odd if they have quilting lines running across them. And how close/far apart should the quilting lines bearing in mind I want it to be machine washable?

Any help gratefully received!

Applique the shapes onto the backing fabric, then make the quilt sandwich to quilt. All quilting batting will say how far apart you will need to quilt it, some need to be quilted closer together than others. Maybe use the quilting around the shapes or quilt circles as an all over pattern? It would add texture not detract from the design.

Hi, that sounds like a lovely gift for your friend.

I would make the top first as you say with the appliqué and get it to a finished point the quilt the layers together. All quilting is is stitching through the materials to hold them secure so you can do it in any way you like. I would try to avoid stitching through the appliqué if you can as it could spoil it. Think you have a few options:

Try to echo your appliqué design by stitching the quilt stitches around it, you could follow the design or just use some random wavy lines which roughly run around them.

Hold the layers together with a small hand stitch at intervals. Just do a few back stitches on top of each other (like sewing on a button) about a hand width apart. I'd err on the side of caution and do them reasonably close together, say 10cm as baby mats need lots of washing!

Do a mix of the two, maybe if your appliqué was fairly central you could do straight lines on the outside and hand stitch it in the middle?

Your wadding will have a maximum space between stitching lines on it but I would go for durability and use plenty of quilting. I always machine bind my quilt too for babies because i think it's more secure. Cluck cluck sew has a really good machine binding tutorial which might be worth a look.

Enjoy

Thank you both for replies, you've given me some good ideas. I will think about how easy it will be to machine stitch around when I plan the appliques! I think I'd better practice on some spare fabric first as I haven't quilted before, so I don't know if I'll be capable of doing wavy lines or if I should just stick with straight.

If the quilting lines need to be, say, 10cm apart, presumably I should either do small appliques that are less than 10cm across, or I would have to incorporate some quilting stitches inside the applique shapes themselves to stop the batting from moving/bunching up?

Unless your appliqué is really big I wouldn't worry too much. Anyway, if it is big and part of the overall quilt design it will be fine to do an all over quilting pattern. It has a way of just looking nice even when you think it won't somehow!