Creative journey of making a special baby quilt

Hi there friends,

and happy February!!

It is cold and frozen here these days, but that’s what winter is all about, right?

One advantage of that – it’s a perfect quilty weather, right??

I am just about done with a very special project – a special and precious baby quilt, for our, coming-in-March, third grand baby!!! Hooray!!!

This will be a first baby for our daughter and her husband and we are soooo excited for them!! We won’t know if it’s a boy or girl ’till birth, so that’s another layer of excitement!

Parents to be are very involved in the process of making the quilt, so here is what I started from:

Daddy-to-be went into my studio one day around Christmas and picked these colors from a stash of solids. At the time we did not have any pattern in mind yet, he just pulled colors he liked… 😁❤️

Then they looked over Pinterest and it turned out they loved quilts with TRIANGLES!

The next set of inspirations came from the fact that both parents are big nature and hiking lovers (something tells me this baby will be on a mountain top before he/she can walk! 😍) . They also saw a baby bedding set in the store that has mountains and bears… both of which they love, so that was my guide.

Ok, so colors of mountains and woods, triangles and all together nature-theme. Got it. 😂

I took this amazing photo off of my daughter’s Instagram feed, as this is kinda a place they love… this was my personal inspiration, for colors, for theme, for ideas…

I had to adjust the initial color pull (made by daddy to be) and add some light colors too…

And this above was what I stated with.

Then came some rough idea “sketched” in my trusty EQ8 – literally made a “one-patch” type quilt and started coloring it in… making mountains, sky and meadow at the bottom…

At this point idea was there, but not quite good yet… can you see the mountains??

Yeah, colors were a bit off and it wasn’t as obvious what I was doing. There were 3 mountains, blue, green and gray one, with snow caps on them, sky above and some water/meadow below… see what I mean?? Haha, likely not at this point, but after some tweaks (colors within mountains needed to be closer in value, snow caps needed to be really white, sky a bit different…) I was ready to go to fabric!!

With a project like this, when you are kinda “painting” a picture, for me nothing works better than just cut fabric, put it on the design wall, cut more, rearrange… repeat.

So first in line were the mountains… here are the colors I started with:

I cut 6″ strips and then some equilateral (60 degree) triangles from those strips, and started “painting” the mountains…

Next was the sky…

Just cut these and few yellow ones for some sunshine, and laid them out:

At this point I remember thinking that this was going really well and I just kept going!! (those great moments when you are just all in, immersed in making… 😊)

Next was the bottom part – some water (lake?) and meadow and maybe even some wild flowers…

With these above all cut, I just laid them all out to complete the “picture”…

Can you see it? The mountains, lake, meadow… yes? Not quite? 😁

I was looking at it, so was my daughter (mom to be) and it wasn’t quite there yet… Well, this was late at night and you know how it works… walk away, come back later and you might see it!

Coming back to it in the morning, I immediately saw that gray (right) mountain just wasn’t right – it was too light in color (compared with other two) and two shades of gray were to far apart. Back to solids stash, some auditioning, few more triangles cut and…

Better, much better. Yes?? What do you think?

If you squint your eyes, can you see my nature scene? I hope so.

Well I was happy with it and it was time to sew!!

I was joining these in horizontal rows. I would stack pieces from left to right, take a stack to my sewing machine and do it one after the other, sewing them in that order (left to right).

Here is a stack ready to go:

Sewing one after the other…

There are few good tricks and tips for sewing together triangles like this… I wonder if a tutorial would be useful? Let me know, I can do one! 😁

Rows were growing…

Lost the game of chicken with my spool of Aurifil just before last row was complete, but of course I had more…

And the top was done!

Now the second part of the creative process begins – how to quilt it and with what colors?

Pulling beautiful Aurifil thread colors from my stash is just as fun as pulling fabric at the beginning!!

I just love it!!

I wasn’t sure if ALL of these were going to be used, but it was a possibility!! 😁

For me, this special quilt is a canvas to pour all my love on to… to imagine this beautiful baby Bear cuddling with it, looking at colors and stitches, dreaming of new adventures…

I started from sunshine and skies…