Blogger's Quilt Festival ~ Fall 2012

It's festival time again!  Thanks to Amy, of Amy's Creative Side, for once again hosting this fun event for us bloggers.  I'm looking forward to seeing the quilts that the rest of you have chosen to enter.  The festival link-up will be open until October 31, so you still have time to put together a blog post if you haven't already.

My festival quilt this year is one that I completed recently, and have recently posted about, but for those of you visiting my blog for the first time, this will be new to you!  Thank you for visiting, and I hope that you will stay and take a look around.  This quilt is currently listed in my shop.

This baby quilt is one of my own design.  Some of my favourite fabric lines are the ones put out by the Sweetwater girls, and for this quilt I used my very last pieces of Hometown, and some of my last bits of Reunion as well.  I used a tutorial by Badskirt Amy for the quick and easy circles.  This was a first for me, and was a lot of fun.

I played around with the arrangement of the circles, on the backdrop of Kona Bone, and finally decided on this layout.  Then, I machine stitched the circles to the background fabric.

Next came the decision on how I would quilt this project.  I've recently been learning how to free motion quilt and knew that I would want to try a new design on this quilt, especially given how much negative space I had to work with.  I found this 'crybaby meander' design via Pinterest (video tutorial here) and when practicing I found it to be a design that flowed easily and was fairly quick to do.  I decided to quilt around the circles, which proved to be a more challenging task than I thought it would be, but in the end I was so happy with the result and the extra effort was worth it!

For the back, I found this really sweet tiny floral fabric that coordinated so well with the Sweetwater prints, and I planned to just do a plain back.  As luck would have it, the piece I bought was not quite long enough, so I ended up piecing it with some of the Reunion pennant prints, and I love it.  Adds an extra little touch that I think is a lot of fun.

I chose to bind the quilt with some gray gingham fabric I had leftover from the backing of another project.  It goes so well with the esthetic of the Sweetwater fabrics.  It's also gender neutral, and I think this quilt would be well suited to a baby boy or a baby girl.

Quilt stats:

Finished size:  32" x 40"

Fabric:  Sweetwater Hometown & Reunion, Kona Bone, unknown 

small floral backing, gray gingham binding

Quilted by:  me, using Aurifil 50wt cotton thread
Category:  baby quilt, home machine quilted