In Like a Lamb...

I'm not entirely sure how tomorrow is March 1st, especially since we've had an extremely weak (if not non-existent) winter in these parts.  *sigh*  And I definitely did not get enough projects completed this winter!  *another sigh*  I probably say that every year, though.

Friends of mine are expecting their second boy on March 15th, so I've spent a couple of late nights after work madly sewing a baby quilt for them.  I'm using a fun pattern called Yellow Brick Road (Atkinson Designs) which I've had on my shelf for a while but never used.  Wow, this pattern works up quickly.  I've already got a completed top and pieced back, just waiting for a weekend to layer, baste and machine quilt!   Photo of the completed top below...

I don't think I've ever put this much red into a quilt in my whole life, and I was a little apprehensive at the start, but the folks I'm making this quilt for just aren't the pastel type.  So I used a lot of super cool fabrics with airplanes, trucks, dots and squiggly lines, and I'm pretty happy with the result.  I was lucky enough to have a little extra backing fabric to cut corner squares from, just to break up the red border a bit.

Close up of a couple of the blocks...

It's kind of hard to see where one block ends and another begins, but the pattern has you whip up a few different variations of a finished 9" square block.  Six fat quarters gets you the whole top sans borders, which for the baby size ends up about 36" x 45" and a pretty sizable quilt for a little guy.  The pattern called for 6 1/2" cut borders, which I thought was ridiculously wide for the overall size of the top, so I scaled back and cut them 5" and added the blue corner squares.  The back is a continuous cut of the dark blue truck fabric, which I had to sew a grey strip down the left side for extra width.

The vertical grey strip is not in the above shot, but pretty easy to imagine... I might use that space after the quilt is done to applique name letters, if I have time, of course!  The project is resting until the weekend when I have more time.  In the meantime, I need to marinate ideas about machine quilting.  I don't have time to send it out to a professional long-armer, so I'll be doing the machine quilting myself with a really cool red, blue and yellow variegated thread I picked up at my local quilt shop.  Happy Thursday, everyone!