En Pointe!

Got a commission from a former colleague for her niece's daughter. 

The basic specs were:

Colors: very neutral: ivory, white, and a hint of blush

Theme: ballerina

Monogram: initial only

I was working on one quilt and had another in the queue, so I just let the idea simmer for a while.

And one day I started doodling  and it just magically appeared!

ON POINT squares!  In quilting "on point" means that the blocks are turned so that they are diamonds instead of squares. 

In ballet, "en pointe" means that the dancer supports all of their weight on the tips of the toes (with special shoes of course). 

So the idea would be to find suitable ballet fabrics and cut and arrange them to be both on point and en pointe.

We found some perfect fabs....with ballerinas and sparkles! These are alternated in the "solid" squares.  The squares are 8" finished (which turns into approx 11" when on point). The ballerinas were small enough that it was not really necessary to fussy cut them to fit. 

The other large squares feature a pattern of pastel colored flowers. The back is made up of ballerinas on music boxes. You can almost see them spinning and hear the music!

For the small square centers, we found a pink (with little dots) fabric. I appliqued these on (with some batting underneath) in the same way that I did the circles in the "Circular Spectrum #72" quilt. But this time I fastened them using a decorative zig-zag stitch.

When I laid out all the squares, I realized that the pinks and whites faded into each other too much; there was no clear definition of the diamond shapes. We had picked out a light blue fabric for the border, so we decided that we could also use it for sashing strips between each block. At 3/4" finished, this meant the blocks were now about 13.5" finished!  Uh oh!!!  Will it be too wide for the backing fabric????  I really couldn't tell until I had it all sewed together, including the side triangles and corner pieces and borders. I barely had enough of the blue to do the sashing and the border. Whew!

When I laid it out, there was about an inch overhang (of the back) all around.  Quilters know that you should always leave several inches, as the size of the quilt can change as you quilt it (depending on how and how densely you do so). I came up with a plan to add borders to the back if it turned out that there was an issue. Luckily, when it was all done, there was still enough of the back fab overhang to be workable. Whew 2!

For the quilting, I chose to do free motion. In the ballerina squares, I used pink thread (in the pink fab) and white thread (in the white one) and carefully quilted around each of the figures. In the flower squares, I just did random quilting with white (but nothing in the dotted-pink squares).      

Here is the result:

Finally, note that the center square has a large monogrammed "B". I don't think I have ever put a monogram in such a prominent place before. It is actually part of the design. 

Is it for ballerina? Maybe, but also for the baby's name: Betty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is just tooooo cute.