When we saw this fabric collection, we immediately knew what we wanted to do with it, and when we were asked if we wanted to play with minky as well, we gladly accepted!
Love you to the moon is the sweetest little collection featuring stars, clouds, rainbows and so much more. It's all soft grays and yellows, so perfect for any nursery. We got a collection of minky and cottons (with a few solids) so we opted to make multiple projects!
Our first project and focal project, was to take a couple patterns from our I Spy book and blow them up big. When we saw the fabric, we knew we wanted a rocket ship flying off to the moon and since we already had a rocket ship, it was perfect! Paired with a few big stars and you have the cutest space scene. We kept the background simple with large squares of the minky. This allows the fabric patterns to really shine.
If you've never worked with minky before, it's so soft and luxurious and fabulous. With a high quality minky, there isn't much stretch to worry about, but you do have to use pins as it has a tendency to walk. It's also a thicker fabric, so avoid patterns with lots of seams. We've never foundation paper pieced with minky before, but by pairing it with cotton and keeping the blocks bigger, it went together fairly easy!
Since babies don't use blankets for sleeping, we put the minky on the top to lay on and used cotton on the back. A simple all over meander allowed me to avoid bulky seams that can be troublesome when free motion quilting. Also, I've learned that the quilting kind of fades into the minky over time, so no need to spend hours on intricate designs.
For the second project, we used the matching cotton fabrics to recreate our Monochromality quilt pattern. This pattern is based off white, gray, and black, and the collection had three prints that were perfect! Monochromality is an easy curved piecing project. This baby quilt was done in a few afternoons.
I knew I wanted something with more texture for this quilt, so I started doodling and came up with this fun diamond motif. If you want to be able to quilt it as well, stay tuned, it's on the schedule for next years videos. It's quilted in rows so can easily be done on a longarm or regular sewing machine. It was also all done free hand, no marking necessary.
Since it was a set, we used the same backing fabric and binding fabric for both quilts. This is just the final touch and ties them all together.
With the set of fabrics, we also got a panel. We don't normally use panels in our quilts, but we loved this one so much we wanted to incorporate it. It was the perfect size for a pillowcase! While not so much for cribs, my big kids still have their baby blankets, so we figured the pillow case will be perfect to grow with your baby when they are ready for a big kid bed.
You can get the Monochromality Pattern here and if you have our I Spy book and want to make a giant rocket or stars, you'll want to increase the size of the pattern 400% (this will require that you tape some papers together). Our stars are simply increased 200%.
We are just about through our amazing year as Michael Miller Brand Ambassadors, but we have one more project to share later this month, so stay tuned!
Happy Quilting!
Kimie and Missy
