It started with a baby quilt

Back in April, my stepdaughter Lindsey told us she had a baby on the way, and my first thought (right after the happy-crying) was: I have to make this baby a quilt. Like, immediately. That panic isn’t exactly rational; quilting isn’t a tradition on either side of this baby’s family. But in the family I grew up in, a baby on the way meant somebody was making a quilt, full stop, and that somehow wires itself into you. This would only be my second quilt ever (I’d learned the basics back in 2000, twenty-six years between number one and number two), and I was making it no matter what.

I found a pattern I loved, Amy Smart’s Baby Sugarhouse Star (her directions are genuinely a gift; thank you, Amy, for teaching me the importance of nesting seams), and then I froze. Not on the sewing, on the shopping. I’d found a layer cake of pinks and teals online, all little fish and sea turtles (we’re boaters who spend most of our free time fishing and I wanted my own little stamp on it), and I was stuck on two things I couldn’t answer from a product photo: would those fabrics actually look right in that star, and would one layer cake even be enough to sew the whole thing? That is a lot of money to guess at.