Modern Baby Quilt

Here's a fun, bold, happy project! A modern baby quilt is just the thing to make at the beginning of Spring.

This is my latest project over at QUILTsocial.

The first post gives the fabric requirements and cutting instructions:

This modern baby quilt steals the show

This project I challenged myself to use solid fabrics and let the stitches add the texure. Of course it was not that difficult to achieve using all of the stitch features of the PFAFF performance icon! I used my old favourite, floating stitches, as I put the blocks together.

Floating stitches on a modern baby quilt make all the difference

If you've been a reader for any length of time you know that I love the churn dash block. This quilt was inspired and is made with the units of the traditional block. I just played with placement of the units to end up with hints of churn dashes throughout. See those floating stitches?

HSTs and piecing a baby quilt top with the performance icon

The quilt top was designed so that I could use the radiant stitch feature on the performance icon. This was a new stitch feature for me and I was curious about how to make it work on a quilt. I didn't want to make a crazy patch quilt - which I think would be an excellent place to use these stitches - but I did want space to show off the stitches.

The modern setting is supposed to look like mountain sides. I was thinking about the song from The Sound of Music - Climb every Mountain - and I used the stitches to help me create a landscape. Trees, weeds, flowers, mixed with snow, rain, and sunshine. Even some lucky clover!

Radiant stitches on the performance icon add joy to a baby quilt

I also used a serpentine stippling stitch in some of the connecting hsts when I quilted the top to represent rivers and mountain streams. I know, it sounds silly, but making all of these different elements connect to a theme made it easier to choose what stitches to use, and which not to use on this project. 

In the end I also decided to use the leftover blue and green fabric in the binding and tested it to get most of it to line up with one of the blue, green corners. The rest of the binding is white which feels like a no-no - I guess I could blame it on the modern tendencies of this project!

I like this photo because you can see how I used different thread colors to help me create my imaginary landscape too. It was hard not to put radiant stitches everywhere!

Stippling stitches on the performance icon add whimsy to a baby quilt

Maybe you need a modern baby quilt in your life? Remember, you could always turn it into churn dashes by moving around the units ;)

If you like what you see, 

could you please go to one of the linked posts 

and leave your comment there?

 It will help more quilters find my project. 

Or pin a photo to one of your Pinterest boards :)

Thanks!

With Joy,

Sarah V.

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Personal Projects at the end of April

April is ending with lots of showers and perhaps, even MORE projects in my quilting space!

I decided to take a quick photo of my two design walls last week because they made me smile! You can see my quilting personality here for sure. I have a few small liberated churn dash blocks done for my Inventory Quilt. Not as many as I should, but I will keep this one going into May and hopefully have a completed top by the end.

What's an Inventory Quilt?

Liberated Churn Dash block tutorial

Liberated Churn Dash quilt pattern ~remember you can save 20% using code IQ20

The three bottom blocks are for a sampler quilt I'm doing with a group of online quilting friends. Each of  us is responsible for providing a block to make each month.

For this month's block I used some saved Cotton and Steel Christmas prints.

The pineapple quilt got moved over to my other design wall where I can see it when I walk into my space. It's paper pieced! I'm so happy I took some time to try this technique again. The flower basket and the pineapple quilts are both challenges in another online quilting group. Lots of independence and creative license there with the goal of sharing a love of the designer's work. I plan to finish both of these in May as they will look great for spring.

The star block is the next block in Darlene D'eon's 52 week challenge. I have actually cut my background fabric and have some color fabrics ready so that I can keep up. So many less pieces than the scrappy bear paw blocks :) I'm really looking forward to seeing this quilt completed at the end of the year.

You can find Darlene's instructions on her facebook page - Darlene D'eon Designs

Would you be surprised if I told you that I have more projects ready to go for May?! I'm enjoying my time at home with my stash and UFOs. I hope you are too!

With Joy,

Sarah V.

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