Minky and linen baby playmat

 What do you think - did I use enough pins?

No, I didn't lose my mind.  There is method to my madness, as you will see in a minute.

Yup, its the dreaded minky.   So sweet, so soft, so stretchy.  (For anyone not familiar with minky, who thinks I have turned into a raving loon, it is a fluffy and very soft fabric.  It's a knit, so it does have some stretch to it, although its not really super stretchy).

This is a little baby playmat that I put together to give my stitching friend Cathy at her baby shower this weekend.  I had been admiring the print fabric for a while, but it seems aimed at babies, but is printed on a slightly coarse linen blend fabric, so I wasn't sure what I would do with it.  I had also been thinking about trying to back a quilt with minky after seeing the Remixed Geese Quilt from Erica at Kitchen Table Quilting and reading her thoughts on working with minky.  At some point I put two and two together and realised that this was the perfect opportunity to use the circus print fabric and try minky on a small scale project, plus the blues are perfect for Cathy's baby boy.

I have to say that I am really pleased with how it turned out.  Putting in all those pins took AGES (and my mum helped a lot), but I didn't have any puckering or shifting issues when quilting.  I used a serpentine stitch on my machine with my walking foot, and I think it looks really nice.

I did start quilting straight lines, but I got halfway through the first one and my bobbin ran out of thread, and I turned the quilt over (I quilted with the minky on the back) and really hated how it was looking.  At that point I unpicked the stitching and started again with the serpentine stitch - I think it looks much much better and works nicely with the dots on the fabric.

I did "give" this quilt to Cathy at her baby shower, but I didn't have time to properly stitch down the binding, so I just tacked it down (using red thread, as you can see).

I will stitch down the binding over the next few days, so it is ready for our next stitching group meeting.  I am also thinking about making a little strap with velcro so that it can be rolled up and carried easily - I'm thinking it might be useful to put on the floor to put baby on when Cathy is out visiting or something like that.

Also, expect to see this binding again - I turned a full metre of fabric into bias binding and this quilt didn't even make a dent in the huge roll I ended up with!

Have you ever tried sewing with minky?  How did it go, and do you think I went overboard with the pins?

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