Sugar and spice

Two of my best friends have had babies this year. So I decided to make them cot quilts for presents.

But because the second of the two bubs only arrived on Friday and the first was back in Feb, I've didn't blog about the first in case my other friend guessed I might make her one too.

But now that both little cuties are safely here and both quilts have been safely handed over to their new owners, I can reveal the sekrit projects.

SPICE

We didn't know what flavour Jethro was so I had to make a quilt that could work for a boy or a girl.

I figured I'd start with green and see what happens, then I found the very cute frog print (Alexander Henry I think) and things went from there. Jethro's mum has always been an outdoorsy, sunny type so the colours seemed right for her.




This was the first quilt I'd actually finished to the quilted and bound stage, so I went with easy grid quilting. One day I'll do a machine quilting class and learn to stipple but not sure I'm ever going to be keen on trying it on a large scale unless I one day have space and money for a long arm machine (they look like fun).

This is the finished spicy orange and green quilt and it worked out well that he's a boy as I think it's more boy-ish. Especially with the tadpole border.





SUGAR

We knew that the lastest bub (who shall remain nameless as I haven't asked her mum about blogging her) was a girl which made life easier. I wanted to try a disappearing 9 patch pattern and knew I wanted to use pinks with a bit of green and blue and had a lovely time picking out these fabrics which were just divinely pretty together and made me think of sugared almonds or candy or fairy floss.



The disappearing 9 patch went together quickly (I guess you'd call this a colour co-ordinated scrappy version, each 9 patch block has eight pinks (four dark, four light) then the blue/green/floral in the middle) and you can do lots of cool things to form patterns with the blocks. You can also do three colour blocks to wind up with something like this, which I also really like the look of and might have to do one at some point. I did a triple border to set off the pinks. So here's my sugar plum quilt.





Once again I kept the quilting pretty easy by stitching in the ditch around each of the squares in the final four square blocks and doing an every other block small square of quilting in the big squares.

Now I have to finish my own big quilt which just needs the borders and a backing before I can send it off to be quilted.