The first baby quilt (and finish!) of 2022

I believe I have reached an age where baby quilts will be prevalent…

Some dear friends of ours have a darling daughter whom we have known since she was a snowflake. The Hubs and I were lucky to witness her wedding to her beloved 5 years ago, and I was thrilled to hear that a baby was coming. I needed to make that baby a quilt!

The December evening when we celebrated our youngest’s birthday brought the unexpected delight of running into Sarah at the restaurant while waiting for our kids to arrive. The Hubs was ecstatic because he had not seen Sarah since the wedding—he adores her and remembers when he would occasionally rock her to sleep! I asked Sarah if she had plans for the nursery and she said she was going with a safari theme.

Enter the overthinker: I immediately thought of an Accuquilt die I have—the zoo animals—and started playing with layout ideas. I purchased a few pieces of fabric and then I started the process of getting the ideas out of my head and onto paper and fabric. 

That didn’t work so well. The size of the shapes from the die did not correspond well with my ideas, so I went to Electric Quilt and played around; it still wasn’t right. By Friday I was overwhelmed and ready to throw in the towel and just piece something together. 

Another thing about that Friday and Saturday—I guess I was exhausted. I didn’t have any downtime during the holidays and with work being what it is, I just got to where I could not move, think or process. I consider it an achievement that I actually went to my dental appointment that Friday instead of rescheduling. 

Which brings to me to where I was a month ago. I mentioned in my last post that I had signed up for a digitizing and design class with Sarah Vedeler. We had our first session and wow, talk about overwhelming! I am somewhat tech-savvy but she raced through that 90-minute+ session and I got to the point where I just sat and listened and observed. It took me a few hours to complete the first lesson. But I’m committed and we will see what happens!

So, back to the baby quilt. I finally got to a place that I was happy with the design, and got moving on it. I had the song "In the jungle, the mighty jungle" going through my head, and those are the words I put on the quilt. I used a font called "Sweet & Salty" at a size of 150 points; sounds large, but it isn't. I played around with the layout of the words.

Here was my final layout with Mr. Moon in the background:

And here is the top with all of the added thread definition:

The quilt orientation and size were not what I originally intended. I just started slapping the applique pieces on the one-yard piece of fabric before trimming the interior section to the desired size...so…the fabric I had purchased for the borders is now the backing! Hey, it’s a baby quilt. And it’s the smallest one I’ve ever made -- 30.5" x 34.25". And it's wonky, but that's me.

So I thought I was going to do an edge-to-edge quilting design on the embroidery machine, but I didn’t necessarily want it to go through the lion…Then I thought, it’s so small, why not FMQ? Again with the I can’t help the overthinking everything. 

The variegated thread was Sulky Blendables, 30 wt. Love this thread.

Wanted some extra detail on the moon. And, if you're wondering,
yes; I individually stitched down each letter.

I'm glad I took this photo because it reminds me I need to remove
the pen markings. I really enjoyed working on the lion's face.

I did free motion quilting without the BSR on The Beaut. There are days when the BSR (I'm a firm believer that the "B" does not stand for Bernina...) and I do not see eye to eye, and I know I need to give it some more time. I stitched down the applique using the straight-stitch method, and used a variety of threads for line definition and quilting. I made bias binding 2" in width, and used the Bernina foot 71 to apply it. I really like the technique. If you're interested, follow Sew Shelly Quilts and watch her binding video on YouTube. She is a Bernina ambassador and she's good at it!

I'm pretty happy with it, and I had a good time making it. I hope Sarah, Austin, and Baby Hudson are happy, too. 

In other news (there's not much), here is a recent photo of the parakeets. They are all male, so the mess is typical of the messes we had when we were raising 3 boys! They have doubled their food intake over the last month:

And every weekday morning I take my neighbor to school. We have had some unbelievable sunrises lately, something which I'm not used to observing in the wintertime. Here's a recent one:

I'm grateful to have the opportunity to witness this beauty.

Go make!