Saturday, October 6, 2018

A Flimsy

I have been working on this baby quilt for the past 10 days and I finished the top this afternoon. I found the pattern in the September/October issue of Love of Quilting magazine.

The pattern is "First Heartbeat by Terri Vanden Bosch.

I changed the pattern a little by adding the third band of blocks.  I did that because when I was shopping, without the magazine with me. I thought I needed 3 different fabrics for the bands. I chose the 3 fabrics and the gold for the small blocks because those were the colors in the dotted fabric.
I had the green fabric in my stash at home but it was not with me at the shop.









A closeup of the fabric in which the color is almost, but not quite, true.

When I got everything together at home, I saw that I had one too many fabrics for the blocks. I also questioned my choice of gold for the small squares. It really doesn't show up well next to the green. I went out shopping again and bought a lighter soft yellow and then decided that after all, it was too insipid.
The quilt needed the turquoise and magenta to brighten it and I wanted the green because it was a perfect match for the green in the dotted fabric. Beware of perfect matches, they can lead you down the wrong path.


EQ7 version of the 4 different blocks in the quilt.
I scanned all my fabrics and sent them to EQ7 and worked out how I wanted to handle the changes. I decided to leave the 6 inch strip of dotted fabric as the pattern called for and change the wide strip from 18 inches to 15 inches.  That makes the quilt 42 x 45 instead of 42 x 42.

This is an easy pattern and it should have been fast. After I made the first band of blocks I decided to figure out how I could press for all opposing seams. That slowed me down a little (and caused me a lot of frustration). I shouldn't have bothered because everything went together easily even where the seams were not opposing.

This is definitely not sweet, but a rather sophisticated palette for a baby quilt.
 However, I do like it, even with the low contrast between the gold and green. 
 I have decided to find a fun print for the back 
and 
I am not going to agonize over it matching anything, 
well.... maybe a little.


1 comment:

Annie said...

I like all your fabric choices, Ruthie. I thought this top was cut and stitched like a bargello strip piecing. I laughed at your last sentence in your post. Because that is exactly me. LOL