Circles Quilt Top

I. am. in. love.

In LOVE.

Totally in love with this quilt top.

Sorry, did I overdo that up there at the start? That's because.....you guessed it!!

I finished up the quilt top for my little boy D on Sunday afternoon. I think its safe to say that he is in love too. It's a nice big generous lap size, measuring about 60" x 65".

I love the movement, I love how all the work fussy cutting the applique was totally worth it (thank you dear hubbie for helping me with the applique!). I love how this quilt contains some of my very favourite boys' prints. Some came from the very very bottom of my scrap basket - fabrics I had forgotten I had - like Laurie Wisbrun's elephants, Ann Kelle's owls, Michael Miller's hedgehogs and Saffron Craig's Beetle bugs (I really thought I had used all those last year).

You will remember last week I was deciding on the colour for the sashing. A lot of people agreed with my turquoise idea so I went off looking for some. I couldn't find turquoise, but I did find this gorgeous blue. The fabric label calls it Sapphire but I think its more like a Peacock blue. Whatever about the semantics, I am so pleased with how it works with the grey and the circles. I was a bit concerned that the grey would be a little dull as a background for my little man, who loves lots of colour. But the blue kind of electrifies the quilt (if that makes sense) and the whole thing just pops. It's so vibrant and exactly what I wanted for him.

I need to baste and quilt this one next...not looking forward to the basting. The effort of basting the Stained quilt left me in bed for most of the day afterwards - I felt so ill - but that was maybe a combination of the basting spray and early pregnancy hormones and utter exhaustion. I think I might pin this one. I'm planning to quilt this pretty simply - cross hatch to outline each of the squares, and the hand quilt around some of the circles as in the original pattern.

Now I need to decide on what project to start next! I'm looking at my Birds and the Bees fat quarters....

I'm linking this up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

 

Quilty Love......

It's getting to that time of year again when its practically impossible to get decent photos. During the week its pitch black by the time I get home from work, and even at the weekends the daylight tends to be cloudy, grey and miserable, even when its not raining. The rain stopped this afternoon for a few minutes and I ran out to the garden with hubbie in tow to try to get some pics of my latest quilt top which is just too big to get an indoor photo of.

This is my red, pink and aqua quilt from my Winter Stitching list and is for our friends' baby girl...just in time for Christmas! It's more of a toddler/child size quilt than a baby quilt but that is the way its intended.

I really love this combo of colours, I think its my absolute favourite at the moment. And, because its my fave, I had a huge range of fabrics to choose from in my stash and my scrap basket - so much so that I would say I only cut 2/3 of what I had pulled for it!  Some of my last scraps of particular lines went into this one, and the tiny inner squares were perfect to use up the small pieces I had saved. I went with a square within a square type design for it (although some of the internal "squares" are actually rectangles!) and used 3 different block designs to bring interest and movement to the quilt.

I previously posted pics of some of the blocks - many of which are fussy cut to make the best use of the prints I had. Don't they work well together? Two of the block designs have the internal square/rectangle off-centre, which actually worked great because I could move and turn them around to have the same blocks side by side but with a completely different look.

I am going to use some of my lovely IKEA hearts fabric to back it, although I need to add a fabric column to it to get it wide enough - going to use some large fabric blocks in the front colours for this. Once I have that done, I'm ready to baste it. I have a big can of 505 basting spray that I got from Janette in River Fabrics and I absolutely can't wait to try it out on this one. It will be my first time spray basting, so wish me luck! I'm slightly nervous as I have the pinning down to a fine art at this stage and hope the spray basting works ok.

I'm planning to free motion quilt in my usual meandering stipple, although I'm thinking of trying some hearts in the quilting pattern like Jessica did in this quilt - I'm thinking that would be perfect for a baby girl!

I'm also pretty much done with my Christmas runner swap items. I just need to handsew the binding to the back and handfinish the little ornaments tonight in front of the fire so it will be all ready for the post office on Monday morning.

Hope you're having a great weekend :-)