The Wallflower Speaks

What's this? It's a lion blanket for my baby boy! The friend that taught me how to make the elephant quilt made a gorgeous lion quilt for my boy. What a beautiful gift, I can't wait to see our little guy drooling all over it. Here is Ollie and the lion getting to know each other.

I have 24 days until my due date, and I am so excited. At times my pregnancy has seemed endless, but now it seems like things are going too fast. I have no idea how I will ever be ready for such a huge responsibility, and at times I really worry that I'm not ready. In the end, I know that Love is the most important thing I can give my baby so I'm thankful that I have such loving friends and family to help welcome my boy to the world.

Labels: lion, quilt

On January 29th, my brother in law and his wife had a baby boy. The family has a history of enjoying trains, so I thought it would be nice to give the baby his own train quilt to enjoy.

The quilt top came together quickly because the center trains are actually one large piece. For me the challenges were the red X corner pieces and the binding.


I made a few mistakes with the borders. They don't all face the right way but hey, it's home made and made with love. The baby won't notice and I think it adds some visual interest.




Here is a close up of the border.

Labels: quilt, train

This Elephant quilt was given to some friends that had a baby in September. The next Elephant is one for me, I think.

The latest in my collection of baby quilts is finally complete. I have put my first binding on my little zoo animal quilt. it even has paw prints on the back.

Next I need to finish another elephant for our friends that are expecting in September, and a train quilt for the new niece or nephew coming in January.

I found this very cute fabric a few months ago. I knew it was going to be another special quilt.


At first I was going to pair it with grey, brown, green and yellow squares of fabric but when I got the fabric home I decided this was way too dull.


In the end I went through my scraps and decided to go with a really bright multi color stripe. It's still under construction now, but I found a really cute paw print material to go on the back. Now I just need to add a border and quilt it. This will probably be the last baby quilt I make for myself. I have 3 friends expecting coming up, and I'd like to make blankets for each of them.

For various reasons, I have had a few baby quilts in a closet for the past few months. I am proud of them, even if they are pretty basic quilts. In the end, I think these are "learning" quilts because I made some pretty big mistakes on each.

The first quilt I worked on is a "froggy quilt". I fell in love with the pink and blue pastels with little frogs on them, and turned it into a log cabin baby size quilt.


I machine quilted the frogs myself, and unfortunately it shows. The quilt is kind of lumpy and bunchy and although the squares themselves turned out very exact, the machine quilting job I did was a disaster.










I didn't set my tension correctly, and it bunched quite badly in a few places. In the end, I don't think any kid will care. Everyone I have shown it to says they don't see the bunches. I think they are just being nice because it sure as heck seems obvious to me.






The other quilt was made from a free online pattern for no reason other than I found a fabric that was too cute to pass up. I only bought about a yard and half of this print, and when I returned I could not find it anymore.



These flannel dinosaurs are cute, but I'm not a fan of how the red and blue squares were done, honestly. This one is hand tied and was finished in a short amount of time.

I love picking children's fabrics for quilts, they have such fun stuff out there and it is easy to make something very unique. And honestly, I don't think you will find another quilt like either of these anywhere.

I heard about a new web page on the radio, and I must say it rocks. Pandora is a new web page that allows you to create an online radio station. You add the names of artists to your radio station, and Pandora's music database picks your favorite music plus similar artists.

The radio stations are pretty good at picking similar music too. I'm very impressed. Check it out!

http://www.pandora.com/

A friend at the office has taught me to make baby quilts in the shape of an elephant. The elephant quilt is a fabulous gift for friends expecting a newborn.
This simple quilt is made with some appliqe and some quilting. It looks very impressive, but can be put together in a fairly short amount of time compared with your traditional quilts.
I piece mine with a large fleece blanket inside. The fleece blankets are $3 at Big Lots, and they look rather nice.
As you can see the herd is growing.