Saturday, November 15, 2014

Best Friend Baby Quilt

My best friend has a baby boy due next month.  Some of her friends threw her a baby shower a few weeks ago, so I was of course racing to get her gift finished in time.  The gift?  A baby quilt, of course!


This quilt was very much inspired by happenings at Stitched In Color.  Readers of Rachel's blog will notice that this pattern is essentially her Penny Patch quilt.  I didn't actually use the pattern posted in her QAL.  It was a little bit too regular.  I preferred the more freestyle look of her original Vintage Tangerine quilt.  The difference is subtle, but it mattered to me.  It meant adding some simple four-patch blocks to the layout, along with the solid blocks and the penny-patch blocks.


This quilt was also inspired by the Purge-A-Long she hosted this summer.  I had these two fabrics from "In The Forest" by Steffie Brocoli of Cloud 9 fabrics:

 

I bought them at a time when I was trying to acquire more fussy-cut-friendly fabrics.  I really liked the fabric, but I don't like primary color schemes, so they were languishing in my stash.  When it came to actually using the fabric, everything I could think of was way too red-yellow-blue or even red-yellow-green-blue for my taste.  It just didn't work.


The purge-a-long inspired me to try.  And it occurred to me that the penny patch sampler would be a great way to use these fabrics.  The last inspiration was to realize that if I made all the large squares low-volume, and only used darker red or blue as small accents, that it would soften the primary-color effect into something I could really get behind---something bright and soft at the same time---something that would be perfect for a baby boy!  Almost all the accent fabrics are blue or red (in a range of shades that also help soften the primary-ness of the quilt).  I just threw in a few yellow squares as a fun little highlight.  


And I love the result!  Enough that the quilt feels entirely worthy of my best friend's baby.  I backed it in another print from "In The Forest"---available at clearance prices by now---and bound it in a hand-me-down fabric from my mother's stash.  

I love everything about this quilt, especially the fact that something so beautiful and so "me" was designed around fabrics that I felt were so "not me".  

It also contains lots of scraps: scraps from the wedding-gift quilt for the same friend, scraps from the quilt currently on my bed, scraps from the backing I used on my sister's wedding quilt, and binding from a big scrap in my mom's stash leftover from a dress she made for me when I was a kid!  

The quilt has now been gifted and is installed in the nursery, waiting for its new owner to arrive in the world.  


This quilt was the first item on my Finish-A-Long list, so at least I've started on it!

And because much of the quilt was cut from scraps, I'm linking up with Leanne and Nicky's Scraptastic Tuesday.




3 comments:

  1. Love the story ad especially how you used some fabric you were not keen on in a way that you were! Result totally scraptastic ! Thanks for linking up to #scraptastictuesday

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  2. This is a wonderful quilt and I love how it includes scraps from projects you recognize. What a lovely gift!

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