Sunday, August 15, 2010

Baby Lily's Quilt

I can finally blog about a little project that has been completed since early July! It's another version of the stacked coins baby quilt, this time using a pattern from Oh Fransson (which is actually featured in Sew Mama Sew). This past summer I have been doing more quilting, and I read Elizabeth Hartman's blog quite often - she's great with colours, and her designs are modern and fun.

Baby Lily was born on June 21, and I wanted to give her something handmade that would be useful (I'm sure she received a ton of clothes, bibs and stuffed toys) so a personalized baby quilt fit the bill. It turned out a little bit smaller than I expected, so I added an extra two rows of off-white sashing to increase the size somewhat. It's just the right size for the park, or using in the stroller. At the time, I didn't know if Baby Lily would be a boy or a girl, so I chose rainbow colours to keep it sort of neutral but not too boring. I love the animal fabric! Lorah said her nursery had a safari/animal theme going on so it seemed like a perfect fit.

I used stippling again to quilt the whole thing. This time, I made my designs much bigger so that there wouldn't be as much thread going onto it - the last one I made felt really heavy, probably because it was so densely quilted.

Some acrylic paint and stamps to put the name and date on...

Here's the back, with just a narrow strip of coins. This is my second baby quilt, and I'm still figuring out how to get the pieces lined up straight. Is it just practice? I thought I had cut and sewn so carefully, but still things turned out wonky and I had to rip out stitches and try again and again. I even pinned! The sashing is hard to get straight. Maybe next time I have to line it up square by square instead of just judging by the ends of each strip.

I did finish a third quilt, the Red Triangles, but I forgot to take a picture of the finished project, and now it's found a new home at my mom's house. I can show you the quilt top at some point...I do have a pic of that.

We just got home from our Canada trip - JJ had a great time visiting everyone. She grew up a lot during the vacation - learned how to sit up, eat from a spoon, and even took a dip in the river!