the manly baby quilt

Thank you all so very much for all the sweet comments on the baby’s room! I really appreciate all the kind words and the well wishes! He still seems content to stay inside, so I guess I get a bit more time for sewing and quilting (or at least that’s my way of putting a positive spin on it!)

This one is one you’ve seen a few times, so perhaps it won’t be very exciting. My sister stopped over the other day and when I showed her the finished quilt, all she could say was “blah, boring, seen it”. And indeed, these blocks have been up on our design wall for what seems like forever. I just looked back, and it looks like I pulled fabrics for this quilt back in 2009, and made these blocks up in early 2010. I had big plans to make this a queen sized quilt with the blocks set on point. But of course, as you can see, time passed and I got busy with other things. I ended up setting other blocks on point, so I no longer felt the need to do so with this quilt.

Anyway, long story… not very interesting. The other day I decided that I should just sew together the 20 blocks I had into a baby quilt. Since this was always called the ‘manly quilt’, now it’s known as the ‘manly baby quilt’. This one is a mix of Denyse Schmidt Hope Valley, several solids, a bit of Flea Market Fancy, some Kei Honeycomb dots and a little Joel Dewberry. (I used the same fabrics for our throw pillows too)

And I’m actually very happy with it as a baby quilt, not only because I can finally call it finished. I know I said I wasn’t going to make any more quilts for the baby, but I guess I lied. Add this one to the pile!

For the backing I used pieces of the remaining fabrics, sewn together into a bit of a strip pattern (yes, made during my strip quilt phase!)

I really like the wider strips as a backing, and once again, the use of many solids really lets you see the quilting design. (or rather, it would have, had I gotten a better photo!)

I played around with some straight line quilting on this one, and I quite like the pattern. Unfortunately you can’t really tell from these sunny photos what the quilting looks like. There are areas with just straight lines, and then a section where the lines cross to create a diamond pattern. It’s always fun to play around with something a bit different! (If anyone’s really interested, let me know – I could probably draw up a little diagram to show the quilting pattern!)

Ok, enough about the quilt, it’s time for a brisk walk… maybe that will get the baby moving?!

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