FF: A Baby Quilt for K.

I'm sure as quilters, you can relate when I tell you this quilt stressed me out something serious. I knew that eventually my friend and quilting sensei K would have a baby, and eventually I'd make said baby a quilt, and OMG, what could I ever make for this baby that would be good enough for such an important friend? I'm 100% serious when I say that I started thinking about this quilt a couple of years before it was time to start.

But then. I won a copy of Modern Rainbow by Rebecca Bryan in a giveaway, and while I swoon over the entire book, the Huckleberry quilt pattern was so incredibly wonderful that I knew immediately that it was the baby quilt I would make for K. I waffled a bit over fabric choices--I certainly do not have that many solids in my stash in the right shades, nor did I want to try and procure them--and finally ended with the idea of using prints and repeating each print four times. The background fabric is Essex linen in black. 

Can I just say, this quilt was fairly easy to put together? I was concerned with the assembly--bias edges! Curves! Templates! But the instructions provided were wonderful, and it came together faster than I expected.

But then I stalled on how to quilt it. Rebecca Bryan's quilting on the original Huckleberry was so divine. I knew that wasn't going to happen. Over a few days, I pondered it, and I even went so far as to sketch out some ideas, which let me tell you, NEVER HAPPENS in the world of Audreyland Hot Pink Quilts goodness. But. It was worth it. I love the center quilting. I echo-quilted the hexagons--gotta have some normal Audrey quilting in there somewhere--but for the quilting of the corners, I found myself stumped once again.

One of the things that had irked me about this quilt creation is that I wanted to add something for K's husband, who is also a good friend of mine, but I could never figure out what. Since this quilt's process has been pretty magical, I was unsurprised when the answer seemed to emerge from nowhere.

I FMQ'd the words "Hello World" into one of the corners, followed by a six-sided star. The other three corners aren't so fancy, just a geometric design, but this one corner is special. A Hello World program is (usually) a simple program to teach beginning computer programmers. Since this baby's papa is a CS guru, and it is inevitable that this little bambino will be surrounded by computers and computer know-how, it seemed fitting. The fact that the same words could also serve to introduce the little bubs to the universe made it extra fitting.

The backing is a batik that my middle son helped me pick out especially for this baby, and the quilting shows up extra yummy on the back. (All quilting was done in black thread, though the piecing was done in mostly navy as I ran out of black thread shortly after I started!) The binding is the same black as the background fabric, but when cutting it, I discovered I was short a 2.25" x WOF strip. UGH. So I cut up some scraps from the hexagon piecing to add a bit of a scrappy element. And I love the way it turned out.

All in all, I'd gladly keep this quilt for one of my own kiddos, so I'm taking that to mean I succeeded in making a quilt special enough for my dear friends.