Friday, May 17, 2013

A "Sweet" Baby Quilt

I've been a moderator over at Craftster.org for a few years, and I love making baby quilts when my mod friends have babies! I was really excited to make a baby quilt for sweets4ever’s new baby, and when she told me the color scheme for her nursery it seemed like fate. I had just completed the Quilt Block Swap Round 2, and the color schemes I had asked for two of my groups had the same color scheme as sweets’ nursery! For that particular swap, you pick a pattern and color scheme and receive 3 blocks from each person in a 5 person group. 12 blocks is about lap quilt sized, and I happened to be in 3 groups! I used 15 blocks from that two different groups of that swap but I still have quite a few left!




I picked all the blocks that I felt had the right colors and worked together well.  The pinwheel blocks weren’t as big as the wonky log cabin blocks, so I framed them out in light gray and then pieced them together.









 I had more blocks I wanted to use than could fit on the front, so I put them on the back. The back is almost another front! I improv pieced the back, and included a section leftover from the quilt I had just made a former mod, retroeva! It's the long blue rectangle in the left column and the squares underneath it of gray chevron, orange deer, and light gray.  I’m really excited that this quilt has blocks from lots of different Craftsters, and from Eva’s quilt. You can see blocks from alwaysinmyroom, Donniesgirl, sloth003, homerof2, and waggonswest. If I'm forgetting anyone, please let me know!








I think here, on the back, you can see the quilting the best. I did wavy diagonal criss-crossing lines inspired by some quilting my friend Jen has been doing.









For the binding I cut into some Orange Painter's Canvas from Laura Gunn, my favorite fabric designer! I like the pop of color it gives to the edges.

I am entering this quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

A "Sweet" Big Brother Quilt

My friend Jean (sweets4ever on Craftster) just had a baby that I made this quilt for. But that baby has an older brother! I had just started quilting around the time I became a moderator, and the older brother was born just previous to this, so I had never made him a quilt!

I thought it would be fun to make him one too so he wouldn’t be left out. I happened to have a really fun rocket panel in my stash, along with a remnant I had picked up of this ray gun fabric.

The colors seemed to work together, so I pieced this bright quilt top together by cutting the panel in two, rearranging it and bulking it out with some strip pieced checkerboard.












For the back I created a  simple chevron out of half square triangles to be a focal point, and used up some of the leftover strips to create some more checkerboard.








I quilted around the squares in the panel, up and down the checkerboard, and then I outlined 3 of the rockets in each panel.  All throughout this project I had been trying to figure out some way of using the blue stripe fabric, but never quite fit it in, but I realized it would work ok for the binding!





I’m not sure if I’m pleased or embarrassed that all of the fabrics for this came out of my stash!