Quilt

Being pregnant with a little girl allowed my mind to start exploring all the cute and endless options for decorating her room. Despite the fact that I had a beautiful bedding set that my mom made for my niece, I started looking at different fabrics to make my own. I fell in love with a brightly colored line and decided to go for it. However, when I found the quilt pattern I wanted to make, I had a difficult time fitting my line into it. After spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide how to make the quilt and bedding with the fabric line I had chosen (and enlisting the help of friends), I gave up and decided I'd just use the line that was used in the quilt pattern.

I really haven't done a lot of sewing and I've never done quilting before, so I had to ask a lot of questions of my friend, Bridget, who had made her baby's bedding earlier this year. I'm glad I chose a fairly simple appliqué quilt for my first project. It made it feel much more doable and less overwhelming. Not to mention that it was a relatively quick project. This is the tutorial I followed.

I started by deciding what fabrics I wanted to use. I followed fairly close to the ones in the tutorial, but wanted the flowers to be a little more pink heavy than red heavy. Here is my terrible mock up of what I decided to do:

Here are some pictures of my work along the way...

I procrastinated sewing around the leaves for a while because I was nervous about messing up. I finally bit the bullet and I think it turned out ok.

Here it is all appliqued prior to being quilted:

  
Once I finished my quilt top, I took it in to be quilted here. I was so anxious to get it back even though I told her she could take her time. Luckily she didn't listen to me and got it done in about a week. :) Here is the finished product (minus the binding).

The back:

I LOVE it! I am so happy with how it turned out. I think the swirls complement the circular pattern of the quilt. (And obviously it is not the typical "baby" quilt size. This way she'll be able to use it for longer and even on a toddler bed.)

All that is left to do is the bedding (bumper, crib sheet, crib skirt). This is what I have decided to use. The top is the bumper with the green dots as piping. The grey will be the crib sheet and the houndstooth will be the crib skirt.

Luckily, my mom is taking care of doing all that. :) I kind of want to do it so I get more practice with sewing, but I also don't think it's going to happen between caring for two children. I'll just stick with making a pennant for her room out of the scraps.

Oh, and here is a newborn shot of Elsie with the quilt in the background.