Frisky Friends and Fronds

Believe it or not, another Morocco travel-mate also has a grandchild on the way, and requested a quilt! She asked for something with elephants, and teal and gray.

Search....search....search........Success!!!!!

I found this pattern (which is a free download!). It also included the most darling fabric collection , so that is what I used.



Here is the back: more elephants!!!!!

The pattern had an error that, luckily, I found early in construction. It did not require the purchase of any additional fabric and was easily corrected. I also made some other mods to the pattern.

For the quilting, I wanted to make the trees and animals pop, so I did shadow stiple quilting to reinforce the tree edges, and then just random stipling around each animal. All was done in white thread. Then I did a gray ditch around the inner border.

Think there are enough elephants?????  :-D

Dots A Lotta Monkeys One and Dots A Lotta Monkeys, Too

The daughter (and sister) of our Morocco travel mates is expecting twins, so they asked me to make TWO quilts!  The specifications were minimal: some pastels and animal prints. So I looked for a pattern that would allow me to feature both. Found this one from Riley Blake, which features large on-point blocks. Then I found a great theme fabric: Mini Monkeys in Primary. That was paired with four colors (plus white-on-white) from the Small Spots collection.  



I used the same color of one of the small squares in One quilt as the setting triangles in the Too quilt (and vice versa).

While the pattern is the same in both, I chose to quilt them differently. The first was sort of shadow-quilted on the white-dotted fabric, going through the 8 small squares in the pieced blocks. The same pattern was repeated in the monkey squares. It was replicated in the green setting triangles. All were done with matching thread colors.

The second was quilted by completely avoiding the white fabric and just quilting horizontal and vertical lines through the small squares (and small monkey squares), and right through the large monkey squares. Again, this pattern was continued into the setting triangles on all four sides.

I hope the twin "monkeys" love these quilts for many years!