Owen's Quilt

Two weeks before his first birthday, Owen's quilt is finally done! Fortunately, its big enough for a toddler (40 x 48) so I'm not too worried about the lateness! Emma was sick and mostly wanted me to sit around with her yesterday, so I got a lot of crafty type things done, including stitching down the binding on this quilt.

I finished the piecing in the middle of last month, but then when I started machine quilting it, my machine got grumpy and kept leaving snaggles of thread and ugly ridges all over the quilt. This was mostly because I was lazy when I basted it, but rather than re-baste it, I simply decided it was small enough to hand quilt, and smooth out as I went.

I quilted with purl cotton, making x-es in the squares along the outside of the quilt and random sized boxes in the rest of the squares. I am not a super good hand quilter, but I really liked the slightly heavier texture hand quilting added to Emma's baby quilt, and I thought it was a nice size to practice on, so I went for it.

This quilt was easy to put together, and really shouldn't have taken me almost a year to make. But there are so many busy fabrics in warm and cool shades that I wanted to use that it took me a while to figure out how to give it a sense of order. In the end I simply alternated dark and light outside blocks, while trying to scatter both the novelty prints and the super busy prints evenly throughout the quilt. In the dark outer squares I also alternated warm and cool fabrics. This quilt was on and off my design wall several times at several stages in between other quilts.

In then end, I'm glad I took all that time, since it is a quilt that is living at my house and I have to look at it every day. When I was finished, I laid the quilt out to show Owen. He was most impressed with the Horton the elephant block.

The back of this quilt is two organic cotton prints - one bought with the intention of backing this quilt, and the other bought because is was so darned cute. The little paper boat print is one of those prints that would have otherwise been scattered through everything I made for the next few years, but I think I'm happy using it on this quilt that I will see every day for many years to come.

I was laughing at myself, as it was a cloudy day yesterday, and I was sad that I couldn't photograph this quilt. Then suddenly the sun came out, and I ran outside to hang it on the clothesline (our back yard is a mud and ice pit), and then drape it across various chairs around the house, madly clicking pictures before the sun disappeared again.

Its been a busy week of finishes - I'll have more to show later in the week (unless more children get colds, in which case I might be too busy making lemon - honey drinks and passing out kleenexes).