Baby boy quilt challenge.....

A couple of weeks ago I found out that the PR consultant we use is due to have a baby....probably about now. (We obviously haven't needed any PR for a while!) Now I love hearing about people I know having babies....particularly as my close circle of friends have all finished having babies and we're all quite a way off having grand children. I love making baby quilts because they are so satisfying....they're generally quick to construct and they're generally easy to manage in the machine and given my last tension disaster that's still not quite un-picked and now back in storage, a little project was just what I needed to get me back in my quilting saddle.

But, challenge number one emerged pretty quickly.

Sarah knows she's having a boy and I don't have a lot of boy fabrics and I'm on a fabric diet.

So using a basic pallet of red, blue and green I went through the left-overs and found that I had enough to make some scrappy squares-in-squares using these three colours surrounded by white. My fabric choices are pretty tame and I end up with lots of solids, spots and stripes so the squares work quite well. (Here it is being held up by my little baby!)

This little quilt is all from the cupboard....some small bits from the zip lock stash, some a little bigger from the plastic tub. Even the white sashing was mostly from the white off-cuts bag. I only had to cut some for the wider top and side sashings. It became a bit of a game after a while setting my own personal challenge to only use left-overs but I'm really thrilled with the outcome and the fact that I managed to build a 1m x 1m quilt.

The binding uses the very last of some fabric that I've had from when I first started quilting about a year and a half ago. Originally used as backing for another quilt and commonly referred to by me as the 'man's pyjama' print. I just had enough for this binding with only about 30 cms of binding zipped away in the binding left-overs bag. So I guess it has at least one more chance of an outing!

The back is from the stash. It's the Ikea hippo fabric in lime. I love this fabric, it's so happy and balanced and I've been looking to use it for ages in the right project and this is it. (I also scooped a 3m bolt of the red hippos a few weeks back....I don't know where it came from, it's been sold out here for ages but there is was right at the bottom of the pile begging me to find it and buy it...so I did with the voucher my sister gave me for Christmas....and seeing as that was a gift....it was OK to buy fabric!)
The final challenge? The quilting. I was pretty nervious about the quilting after my last disaster. But I made an early start yesterday. Cleared the decks, got out the instruction manual, made a few tension adjustments and it all worked out OK. It was all stipple quilted in a couple of hours.

Baby boy quilt challenge completed!