pink lemonade | a quilt for Caroline

Recently I was able to check another baby quilt off my list, though there are six more to finish before the end of the summer! My friend Hillary is expecting her second daughter soon so I asked her for some inspiration for a quilt. She sent me a few photos, one of the curtains she's using in the baby's room and one of a simple nine patch quilt. The curtains looked like a classic Laura Ashley or Waverly print - vintage red floral on a creamy white background, so as usual I went to my stash to find some fabrics. Unfortunately, I didn't have any red and my low volume prints were lacking, too. I ended up finding a scrap of fabric (the subtle yellow, gray, pink, and red floral - I think it's by Momo) that felt like a good jumping off point and then added a bunch of yellow polka dot scraps and some white seersucker. I still needed some red so my mom and my aunt were kind enough to let me shop their stashes. I found a red polka dot by Denyse Schmidt in my mom's stash and I got some red gingham from my aunt. The border is a print from Lizzy House's Guising collection. 

I posted the picture Hillary had sent me of the inspiration quilt to the Rhode Island Modern Quilt Guild member facebook page to ask everyone what they thought the pattern might be. The consensus was a nine patch, and since I'm a new-ish quilter and mostly self-taught/internet-taught, I wasn't familiar with the way to construct one. Lucky for me, my friend Tina from the guild helped me with the pattern - she designed the simple nine patch using EQ7 and included all the fabric measurements and cutting instructions which made it super easy to construct. She saved me so much time because if I had done it my way I would have been piecing the squares individually! Strip piecing was much quicker and more efficient. Unfortunately, I goofed when I was cutting my strips so the effect isn't quite the same as the quilt I was using as inspiration. Oh well! Since I was using scraps I couldn't cut more, so I just had to make it work. I used a large cut of one of Heather Bailey's True Colors prints and then added a bunch of scraps from the front to make the back big enough. I have a love/hate relationship with piecing quilt backs - I love to use up scraps, but I hate to spend so much time on the back! It's so much quicker to use one piece of fabric for the back, but more often than not I end up piecing. It does make it more fun to look at, and the owner of the shop where I learned how to long arm, Mad About Quilts, told me that a pieced back adds value to a quilt, which makes sense because it certainly takes more time and effort!

I quilted diagonal lines in a crosshatch pattern across the quilt and then bound it with scraps from the top. I think the red polka dot is my favorite piece :) Oh, and I have to give credit for the name of the quilt, Pink Lemonade, to an instagram friend, @tinkerellen - thanks, Cheri! I packed up the quilt along with a set of ladybug beanbags for Big Sister, popped them in the mail, and Hillary received it a couple weeks ago. I was happy to hear that she likes it, and I look forward to seeing a picture or two of the baby snuggled up in her quilt once she's born!

P.S. Here's the quilt I made for Hillary's older daughter a couple years ago - a quilt for Audrey.