Two quilt tops

I finished two quilt tops I'd been working on.

The first one is one for me. This is (mostly) fabric from the "Backyard Baby" line of fabrics - a lot of fabrics with cartoonish bugs on it, and one print has trees with a dog sitting under it, and one has maple samaras (I bought 4 yards of that one to be the backing).

The quilt pattern I used is called Bits and Pieces, but I had more fat quarters than the pattern called for, so I just kept making blocks and wound up with a bigger quilt.



In the end, it wasn't as wide as I wanted it to be (without the border, it's about 42" by 56"), so I found the border material in my stash and just stuck a couple of 4 1/2" borders on either side to make it wider.

Here's a close-up. You can see the maple-samara print (it's the one that form the "bars" on the middle-left block) that I also bought to use as the backing.



I like how the quilt came out sort of "pale" - how the fabrics (except for the border) almost seem to have a faded or washed-out appearance. One of the things I like about working with quilts is being able to use a diversity of color palettes.

The second quilt is the one that will be a baby quilt.

I think I can reveal now that the baby we are all excited about is my brother and sister-in-law's (they've begun telling people outside the family). This was a quilt I had already made up the blocks for, and was originally planning for myself, but when I found out they were going to have a baby, I decided to make it a baby quilt for them (...and it will probably be a first-bed quilt, considering how big it came out).

I did have to change what I planned to use as the border. I don't know the sex of the baby (They are unsure they are going to ask to be told; they seem to want to be surprised) so I had to keep it gender-neutral. I was originally planning the wide border to be a pink fabric with tiny orange highlights. I found the fabric I wound up using in my stash, and it seems like it was one of those "meant to be" things because not only does it look really good on the quilt, but I had EXACTLY enough to make the borders as the pattern was written. Any less of the fabric and I would have had to make them narrower and also piece them.

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I do still need to get a backing fabric - I don't have anything that seems just right for it. I'm going to look at the "wide" fabrics the local quilt shop has and see if there's one of those 80" or whatever wide fabrics that works, so I wouldn't have to piece the backing.



And here's a close-up. As I said, I'm really pleased at how RIGHT the border fabric looks on the quilt, considering it was a largely on-a-whim grab out of my stash.