Tummy time mat, all the rest

Well, I got it done for Christmas.  I sure didn't get step by step pictures of the rest of the making, though.

Here's the finished product, complete with baby:

The play gym above her is from Ikea.  I find it not nearly as obnoxious as a lot of the other ones I've seen.  I love babies, but I hate the baby land feeling that comes when you have a newborn and your whole house is just covered in blankets, bouncers, swings, burp clothes, and all the rest.  Am I alone there? Anyway, I feel like the Ikea play gym is a lot less baby-ish than a lot of others, so I don't mind it so much.




Now for some details. Here's the other vision quarter:

{Don't mind my feet there at the bottom}

Just a child mirror attached to a wedge pillow and two loops for attaching toys. 

The mirror is one of those ones you can get for your car to look at rear-facing children.

The mirror sticks to the mat with velcro.  The wedge pillow actually has two sets of velcro on it- one set on the short side to make the mirror stand up at a steep angle, and another (in the picture above) on the opposite long side that will make it be at a low angle, for when the baby is sitting up and looking down at the mat.  I feel pretty smart about that.
I also felt smart figuring out my pillow dimensions.  I used the pythagorean theorem and the sine function to get things right.  I always liked trig, and as it turns out, it's still actually useful!

For the last quarter, the sound/hearing one, I had a bit of a dilemma.  A lot of store bought play mats have squeakers in them, or buttons that play music.  I thought it would be really cool if I could DIY that, but I never figured out anything that was actually doable.  Thus, for this quarter, I just attached a bunch of loops.

I'll use the rings to attach things that make noise.  It's nothing too special, but it works.  My parents got Elle a bus that lies flat and has a bunch of buttons that make noise and play songs, so that works. 

After I finished all the quarters, I pieced them together and then put the grey square down over the center and just like that my quilt top was done! The grey square is attached like an applique- I cut it, folded the edges over once about a half inch and ironed, then sewed it down around the edges over my pieced top.

I quilted it quarter by quarter, too.  My original plan was to use different techniques in each section, like a grid in one and stippling in another, but that proved to be a bit ambitious.  I just did wavy lines instead.  I kind of wish I had done them a little closer, but it was Christmas Eve night and I just wanted this thing DONE.

I machine bound it using this tutorial and it worked out pretty well.  It's got some problems, but I'm not embarrassed of it as a first try. 

{The backing is the same grey as the middle square and the binding}

{This was by far my best corner.  The others are a bit wonky.}

 Here it is, all finished.  It was such a great feeling to get this done.  The littlest miss likes it, too, if drooling and chewing and spitting up on everything is any indication of fondness.  I'm pretty sure it is.  If you're less than a year old. 

Making it was not nearly as frustrating as I thought it would be (my expectations of frustration were incredibly high, but still).  Working on it in quarters made it pretty manageable- I definitely recommend it as a strategy. 

I hope everybody else got all their handmade projects done in time for the holidays!