Petals

In my last post, I mentioned a quilt I had started piecing and quilting by hand.  The construction of this quilt began at the beginning of December 2012 and finished towards the end of March 2013.  It was truly a labor of love, but I'm so proud of the results.

This quilt started with the knowledge that Zach and Alysa, the mom-to-be (again), was expecting their second child, a little girl, in May.  I wanted to make her a baby quilt, but any old baby quilt just wouldn't do.  Alysa has a great sense of style and decorating sense and is a master at DIY projects.  I wanted to create something that reflect who she is as well as something that would coordinate with her nursery.  Since I was doing this quilt completely by hand, I started this quilt shortly after she revealed the gender and took a few risks with the fabric selections since I didn't know exactly what she was going to do in her nursery yet.  Here's the fabric collection I picked.

Now, I had the fabric and I needed to figure out the design.  I found a print on Pinterest that has always caught my attention whenever I've seen it posted and the thought occurred to me that I could recreate it as a quilt.  It is a fun, modern design and would work well with the fabric selection.  Here's the print:

For the quilt, I created a template out of card stock and started cutting petals out of each fabric.  I basted the quilt by laying out the backing, batting and the background fabric for the front.  I placed the petals and pinned them to the layers of fabric.  Once everything was in place and the entire quilt was basted, I used a quilting hoop to start hand-appliqueing each petal down and then quilting the petal down to secure the layers of fabric together with a pale pink thread.  I continued this process until I had every petal secure.  Once that was done, I changed to a pale aqua thread to quilt between the petals into the negative space to finish out the quilting design.  I usually try and put the baby's initial on the quilt as just an added touch, but I wanted to try something different with this quilt.  Instead of hand-appliqueing the initial down using one of the fabrics in the quilt, I put the initial into the quilting of the quilt.  Here's the finished product.

 What's even better than taking photos of my quilts myself?   It's having a professional do it!  Cindy Isom, a very talented photographer in the Memphis area, took family and newborn pictures of Zach, Alysa and daughters.  They were very kind and included this quilt as a prop and the pictures are so wonderful.  Here's just a taste from the photo session.