I made you a mixtape | a quilt for Jonas

This is my entry for the Bloggers Quilt Festival! I'm excited to be participating for the first time :)

When I found out my friend Ashley and her husband were expecting their third baby I immediately started thinking about what sort of quilt I'd like to make for him or her. Then I found out that they weren't going to find out the gender of the baby. This is what I have to say to that: boo! I am a planner and I like to be able to check things off my to do list. When my friends don't find out what they're having I can't make a quilt in time for the baby's birth so I feel like I'm behind and can't properly welcome the little one when they arrive. I know, totally not a big deal, and I sound like a big whiner, but I do think it's cool for the parents (along with everyone else!) to be surprised on the baby's birthday. So this time, to make things easier on myself, I talked with Ashley about what she was planning for the baby's nursery and gave her a few options for different styles. She told me what she liked and I decided to make two quilts! One in case the baby was a girl, which I wrote about yesterday, and one if the baby was a boy.

The inspiration for the quilt was the fun mixtape print. I saw it a couple years ago and bought a yard, knowing it would make a great focal point in a quilt some day. I added in lots of grays - stripes, polka dots, and a couple solids, framed everything a nice blue, and sashed the whole thing in solid gray. Besides the mixtape print this quilt was made entirely from scraps!

The back is made up of the remaining large piece of the mixtapes, a bright three dimensional looking print, and some of a print from one of Denyse Schmidt's collections for Joann, plus some solid navy on the bottom. Like a lot of quilters, I like to use up pieces left over from the front and hunt through my stash for large cuts of coordinating fabrics when I'm designing a backing. I quilted it with diagonal lines about an inch apart, but the lines are a little wonky because I just eyeballed them as I went along. The binding is the scrappiest I've ever done... so many seams! It felt like it was never going to be long enough, but after piecing together twelve different strips I finally had a piece that would work.

Side note: I love this baby's name! I've considered using Jonas as a first name for both our boys but ultimately decided we wouldn't ever use it because I don't like how names that end in S sound with our last name that starts with C (Jonas Celeste sounds like one word to me), and Grey was the runner up to Finn! We basically ended up going with Finn because it was Ezra's favorite :) 

This is by far the coolest location of any of my quilt "photoshoots" - if you can call them that, haha... Matt and I were going out to breakfast at my absolute favorite place to eat in Providence, or probably anywhere, Nick's on Broadway, and right before we left I remembered this awesome mural (or is it graffiti? I don't know!) nearby. So I took the quilt along and made Matt hold it up for me while I stopped traffic and stood in the middle of the street to get the shots I wanted :) I think it was the perfect backdrop!