Lots of lovely babies coming into the world this year! What a great reason for quilting! I've made a bit of a habit out of making quilts for the new tiny people closest to me. It's so nice to create something entirely different from my usual books and collages. This time I made a simple quilt for a little girl born mid-September using Forest Floor fabrics designed by Bonnie Christine for Art Gallery.
As you can see, this isn't a baby-size quilt. I like to make larger quilts that can be used all through the childhood and even as a lap quilt later on. Babies stay babies for such a short period, and it's not that much more work to create a child size quilt if I have the option to do that (time/energy-wise). Also making a larger quilt allows me to pick more cute fabrics!
The Forest Floor collection includes loads of beautiful prints that worked beautifully with the matching solids. There are bunnies and bugs and mushrooms and all sorts of things you could find on the forest floor, especially if you're a bit closer to it than adults are. I didn't know the gender of the baby when I was picking the fabrics I was going to use, but the colour scheme of the collection would've allowed me to create a more boyish quilt had I wanted to. I found out the baby is a girl before I got to work, but I don't really believe in colour coding baby things, so I opted not to create a completely pink quilt, and went for pink, blue, and green instead.
The big sister of the new baby got her own quilt a couple of years ago. As I had some leftovers from the large quilt I decided to make a little quilt for the big sister's baby doll. I'm in no way a great quilter, but I find it's good for me to create something without the pressures of perfectionism for a change. I stick to simple patterns and do my best, and that's perfectly alright. My mother can do all the crazy difficult and time-consuming entirely-from-existing-fabric-stash quilts.
As I'm writing this post the next baby and her quilt are both almost ready, so it won't take long until the next quilt blog post from me!