#LadyMSews || A lovely little animal quilt for Violet

Hey gang!

Earlier this year, I was so blessed to be asked to be the Godmother of my little cousin Violet. This girl is the cutest little thing you ever did see! I wanted to do something extra special for her christening, so I decided to make her a baby quilt.

This was my first “real” quilt – I’ve dabbled in t-shirt quilts – and I found it quite challenging! Actually the only part that made it difficult was the topstitching, but boy was that exhausting. I always thought that I’d like to be a quilter one day but after cranking out this little guy on my home machine I can’t imagine doing it for a full sized. If I did, I would definitely need to rent a long arm. Now I understand why quilts are so expensive!

I did have a lot of fun piecing it together (I think in the future I’ll do the piecing and send out for the topstitching) and I’m really happy with the outcome. I used the Baby Rosebuds pattern from Craftsy.com but instead of the flowers I added little appliqued animals with my Slice Fabrique – I love that thing! I did this for 2 reasons: a) I didn’t want the quilt to be too girly-girl, and b) both of little Violet’s parents are biologists! That house is animal-crazy I tell ya!

As I said, I’m pretty pleased with the end result. It’s not the most perfect quilt ever made, but for a first-timer I’d say I did a pretty good job. Besides, the animals kinda steel the show!

I appliqued the animals on with fusible first, then secured them with simple embroidery stitches, and added little eyelash details.

My friend Rachel helped me pick out the fabrics – most of which came from Purl Soho. The fabrics for the animals I either had laying around or I got from the City Quilter. I’m not sure how well it reads in the pictures but the base (white) fabric is this adorable cream cotton with little white polka dots!

For the topstitching I just sort of did a ripple effect on each of the animal squares, the pieced squared I simply “stitched in the ditch” which made the shapes really pop, and for the outside border I did sort of a willy-nilly zig-zag stitch.

The only notice-ably wonky part was the back, which I had to sort of piece together in a mish-mash of ways because I was starting to run short on fabric. Its abstract 🙂

The fabric for the backing I just happened to have on hand, I don’t even remember where I got it, but I love the way it matched-but-didn’t with the front of the quilt. And the floral added a tad bit of girl-ish whimsy without going over the top.