Simply Giraffes

This quilt marks the beginning of the year 2013.  (I'm slowly but surely catching us up to the present.)  At this point, I had taken a 6-month hiatus from quilting due to some craziness in my life...nothing too dramatic, just 2 full-time working parents with 2 very energetic toddlers and a husband who was also in grad school full-time.  Adjusting to the shift in our home life took me a bit, but once I did, I was determined to start quilting again.  I decided to do a hand-pieced and hand-quilted quilt that I could take with me and quilt while I was with the kids and not be tied to my sewing machine...that was a bigger undertaking than I had first thought and a story for another post.

When I found out a friend, Emily, was expecting her first child, I wanted to do something simple that wasn't too daunting and I could finish quickly.  I also knew that I wanted to trying machine quilting and I wanted to learn how to make my own binding.  While on Pinterest one day, I found my way to this blog from a quilting pin.  This simple quilt was exactly what I was looking for.  There was no piecing involved.  I knew I could finish the quilt over a weekend without having to completely ignore life for several days to get it done.  I knew the colors of the room were aqua/teal, yellow and gray, so I bought 3-yards of gray fabric as my background and bought several different shades of aqua/teal and yellow threads to quilt my lines.  I cut my yardage in half and basted my quilt, which felt weird since I was using solid pieces of fabric and I started machine-quilting.  I started putting randomly angled lines across the quilt changing out my thread color periodically until it was thoroughly quilted.  I was amazed at how easy it was and how quickly I got it done...what a wonderful introduction this quilt was to machine-quilting.  I found some yellow and gray patterned fabric that coordinated well and learned how to make the binding for the quilt following Amy Gibson's Block of the Month 2012 binding tutorial.  It was easier than I imagined.

When the quilt was all done, I stepped back and felt dissatisfied with the results.  As easy as it was to finish the quilt, it lacked a point of interest.  At this point, I started stalking Emily's Pinterest page for applique ideas.  She had a few giraffe items on her page, so I went searching for something I could create a pattern of.  I came across this print and ran with it.  I pulled some fabric from my stash, pieced and hand-appliqued the giraffes in place and was pleasantly surprised with the final results.