2019 Finish-A-Long - First Finish

My first finish for the year - the Pastel Baby Quilt. 

You can find my list of proposed finishes for the 2019 Finish-A-Long in this post. 

Please visit Leanne's blog She Can Quilt for more information on the Finish-A-Long. You will find  detail on how this link up works and also find the list of bloggers who are hosting this great event. The Link up for the First Quarter Finishes is on April 10th.

This quilt was a surprise all around. I started this over Xmas for something 'mindless' to sew, so started to cut up the Fat Quarter bundle of Foxglove Gardens fabric by Leanne Beasley for Ella Blue fabrics. These are not my colours but I thought that they would look nice for just a quick little baby quilt. As things go, I then cut out a few birds with my Accuquilt Go cutter just for fun and appliqued them on the quilt top to jazz things up a bit.

As these pastels are very specific, I could not find a backing that I could use. The green in particular is a green-yellowish colour and it was clear that I was not going to find a good match. I finally decided to piece my backing together from the leftover fabrics...for this I watched Elizabeth Hartman's free Craftsy (now Bluprint) class 'Creative Quilt Backs' and with her fabulous guidance was able to piece all the bitses together. This was great...no measuring, minimal cutting and just like putting a puzzle together. And bonus...I finally 'got it'!

For the quilting I selected a dainty, cute design from Christine Maraccini's book 'Machine Quilting Solutions'...also a first. Had looked at that design many times, but was never quite game enough to try this for an allover design. However, this little quilt just needed that particular design.

Finished quilt measures 36.5in x 41.5in

Binding is a bit hard to see...I was able to find a striped binding with the exact pastel pink and green in it. Funny enough it also has some blue in it which is not in the quilt top, but it weirdly matched anyway.

The quilt is stitched on my HQ Sweet 16 with dusty pink Omni thread (40wt) both in top and bottom as I wanted the quilt to be reversible and the pattern to show both front and back.

Close up of the Cotton Blossom allover design

Nice texture and easy enough to stitch out, however you do need to be able to improvise a fair bit to fill in the empty space consistently. Overall I managed this quite well, but had to concentrate, stop and start and look ahead and around me to see where I missed spots. This design was great in that you could just swirl over to the spot that needed filling and then continue on your way.

Linking up to Quilting is more fun than housework Oh Scrap!

Karin