a quilt for Liam | elephants and stripes (of course)

This simple baby quilt is the last from my backlog of unblogged quilts! I made it for a friend's son (who happens to have just turned one on Sunday - happy birthday, Liam!) and chose the prints after spying some elephants on one of her baby related pinterest boards :) I had the perfect gray elephant fabric in my stash and then chose lots of blue and gray fabrics to go with it. I didn't follow a patten, just cut large squares and then used a slice and insert technique to make a few of the blocks a little more interesting.

Navy sashing to give all the prints some breathing room...

and green polka dot binding for fun :)

As usual, the back is a large cut (this one is a gray circle/dot print by Denyse Schmidt for Joann) plus leftover fabrics from the front. I quilted it with simple straight lines on either side of all the seams.

Also, wasn't the light just perfect on the day I took these photos? Sometimes I love our living room :) Anyway, thanks for hanging in there with all these quilts! Now brace yourselves, because I have a list of quilts to make as long as my forearm and this time I intend to keep up with them here!

plus one | a quilt for Finn

When I found out we were having another boy I admit I was relieved. I knew what to expect, somewhat, with a boy, and I loved the idea of two brothers. I was excited to welcome another little guy into our family and I couldn't wait to welcome him into our lives. One thing I love to do to welcome a baby is make a quilt. Of course, right? So I started planning out what I would make for my second baby boy. I decided to use a cool sugar skulls print I had been hoarding as the accent of a plus quilt because I hadn't made one yet and I like the simple modern design. I mixed in lots of graphic gray prints from my stash as well as a few solid grays. I quilted it with vertical and horizontal straight lines to accent the lines of the plus signs.

The backing is mostly a white and gray stripe I bought with a gift card I won to Pink Chalk fabrics, and I added some strips of the sugar skulls because I love them and had to use them again. It's bound in a gray and white seersucker stripe which makes it even more soft and crinkly. I've used seersucker in a few baby quilts over the years and I love the texture it provides. This quilt may be simple but it's one of my favorites because it's the one my sweet baby boy snuggles with.

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!