Riff on Recipe Cards, a Baby Quilt from the stash!

Marny here...just want to share my latest little project.  A baby quilt for a special little guy!

Last Thursday morning I got the itch to start and complete a baby quilt.  A little collection of fabric has been sitting in my stash for quite some time.  I ordered it from Monaluna fabrics years ago.  All three pieces are originally from her Monaco collection.  The circles and dots are still in that collection, and the scooters have been redesigned in a new collection.  

Rather than reinventing the wheel, putting a new spin on one of our patterns seemed like a fun challenge.  I love the table runner version of Recipe Cards.  The proportions are smaller than the child and throw sizes and suited the scale of my Monaluna pieces.  Luckily I had the three values necessary AND two yards of just the right green solid to dive in and get the quilt started!

This baby quilt is very different from the Recipe Cards pattern.  I didn't try to establish the diagonal seen in the quilts or the total symmetry of table runner.  This baby quilt uses a different layout.  I still wanted the illusion of layered rectangles though.  That is where the three values on a contrasting background comes into play.

The quilt completed. It is hard to see in this photograph, but the entire surface has been channel quilted.  I had never done it so extensively, and I learned some lessons along the way.  Even with my errors, I love how channel quilting looks!  The backing is a good quality flannel and the batting is Hobbs 80/20 fusible.  

For some reason, quilting from top to bottom, followed by bottom to top seemed like a good choice.  WRONG.  Can you see how the edges of the blue rectangle almost seem scalloped?  That is because when you stitch one direction and then the other it becomes a "push me pull you" situation and the fabric distorts between the stitching lines.  The remainder of the quilt was quilted one row at a time from top to bottom.  I didn't aim for perfection, in fact I purposely made the channels slightly different sizes, but all are about the width of the pressure foot.  It looks purposefully not perfect. 

  

Another little hiccup in the process was the binding.  There was not quite enough of the circle fabric in the aforementioned stash to complete the binding.  Inserting the green to fill the gap makes the edge just a little bit more interesting!

 

Close up of green inserted.  And the diagonal ends seem to run opposite directions, another hiccup.  But the resulting trapezoid is kind of interesting in itself.

Room for yet another hiccup? In writing the blog and looking at the photos I also made a mistake in transposing the layout from the pattern, oh well, it is still balanced, but not quite the way I intended.  I should have drawn it on graph paper like I usually do, but I was having too much fun pushing ahead with the fabric.  I actually cut the correct pieces and then decided they were wrong and "corrected".  Silly me.  Luckily the quilt still works and makes me happy!

Till next Tuesday...