Ark 3

One of my mother-in-law's dear friends has just become a great-grandmother for the first time! She has been a long-time admirer of my quilts (at my MIL's apartment), so when she learned of the coming event she jumped at the chance to have one made for the new baby.  She looked at my blog posts for some inspiration and decided that she wanted a Noah's Ark quilt.  I have already made two of these (Sebastian's Ark and the original Noah's Ark), both of which used / were based on patterns found in "A Quilter's Ark", by Margaret Rolfe.  I don't like to do the same pattern more than once, so each of these is a little different: different arrangement of the blocks, the size of the blocks, and the animals, etc.

Once I agreed to do this pattern, she informed me that her grand-daughter (the mom-to-be) has always liked armadillos (!) and could I include one in the quilt!!!   Hmmmm.....   If you take the Noah story literally (and who doesn't?), then here had to be armadillos on the boat.  Guess they just don't have as good p.r. as the elephants, zebras, giraffes, and doves.  Well, even so, my pattern book does not include a paper-pieced pattern for an armadillo. But a search of the interwebs turned one up!  In previous Ark quilts the blocks were 5x5 or 6x6.  This pattern was 5x8.  I figured that reducing it would be problematic (lots of little pieces), so instead, I picked the other animals and reconfigured the blocks to varying sizes so that the 5x8 would work. Of course, this meant that I had to actually enlarge the other 11 animal blocks! The animals are not to scale, but what the heck.  I also had to slightly adjust the size of the Ark block.

Since I was adding this "odd" animal, I also decided to include a panda because it was so much fun and so cute in the Best Friends quilt (yes!, there were pandas on the Ark as well!).  And, I put in a sheep; hadn't done one before and it just seemed to fit in well.  The other 10 animals have made previous appearances (and, yes, I am running out of the zebra and tiger fabs!).

The back fabric and binding is a really cute Noah's Ark pattern.  Click here to see the back (and more pix of all my Baby quilts).

And here it is: Ark 3!

Bon Voyage, Little One.