Baby Blooms

This quilt is for baby Isabella, sister to William (whose quilt I made exactly 2 years ago). 

The parents asked for a flower theme, with pastel colors.

We looked around and found this pattern on the internet at Sew Fresh Quilts. However, as written, the finished quilt would be 63" x 83"!  That's a tad too big for a baby quilt.  The odd size is also a result of each block finishing at 8" x 15". Definitely not your normal square block!!!

Initially, I thought I could just scale down the blocks, to maybe 4" x 7.5". But with all the pieces in each flower, that would have been very difficult to make and the effect of the different colors / patterns in each flower would have been practically lost. 

Instead, I just reduced the pattern from a layout of 5 across and 4 down to one of 3 across and 3 down. This gave me a finished size of 38" x 60". Five feet is still pretty long for a tiny girl to drag around, so maybe they will just hang it on the wall.

The petals of each flower are made of 4 different fabrics. So we decided to make two sets: 5 of the flowers have one grouping of the same four fabs, and the other 4 flowers have a different set of fabs. The leaves and stems are the same for all nine flowers.

I free-motion quilted each of the blossoms using a pastel variegated thread. For the leaves, I used a modified zig-zag stitch and sort of randomly eased my way across each (twice) to simulate the ribs.

The sashing is white-on-white with tiny stars (we were not able to find white-on-white with flowers!). But the outer border does have tiny white flowers on a light teal (mint?).

And on the bottom, I added an "Isabella" monogram, also in variegated pastel threads.

A very happy quilt! Hope you love it, Isabella!