Petey's Quilt

I 💔  Baby Quilts!

I've been wanting to share this quilt with you for a while.  The quilt was done in record time, but I shipped it off before I remembered to take photos.  

My grandson Peter was born last September, my son's first son, so of course I wanted his quilt to be special.  But I also wanted it to be quick -- his two big sisters both had to wait a year for their quilts.  😬  Of course, you can guess how that went...
























I started with a charm pack featuring garbage trucks and other "things that go" (blue and orange, yay!) and jumped right into my go-to baby quilt, a disappearing 9-patch in a traditional layout.  I fiddled with the squares to maximize the variation in both color and pattern in each block.

Have I showed you my "design wall" before?  My husband didn't want anything permanent on the wall, so I rigged up this beauty -- squares of Velcro sewed along the edge of a piece of flannel, and the matching counterparts stuck to the top of the moulding on the closet doors.  It's not nice and flat, (hence, "wall" in quotes) and using it usually requires some pinning, but in general it does the trick.

Once it was sewn and cut up, I took it in to my Thursday morning quilt group (and the LQS's sturdy design wall) to fiddle some more.  As always, I wanted to line the blocks up so that there would be no seam-matching until the final rows were sewn together.   (Note to self: it probably would be just as easy and maybe faster just to ignore this compulsion and match the seams). 

Next step:  the backing.  You know how I feel about that (remember this post?).  I found this perfect fabric at my LQS (Riverhead Vac and Sew).  Sorry, the lighting was the best...

My daughter-in-law lived for a decade in Brooklyn, so the New York City vibe fit right in.  Plus, I'm a geographer, so the whole map thing made me happy.  Unfortunately, I realized after I started working with the fabric that it was limited to Manhattan only.  Well, that's OK.  We have family in New Jersey, and we're on Long Island; a few signs should do the trick.

I see Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels in this baby's future!

I did a diamond pattern with my walking foot in the border, but decided to "walk" around the streets of NYC for the rest of the quilting.  This required a LOT of twisting and turning of the quilt, but I (kind of) enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what route to take in each section and how to start and end at a bridge so that I didn't need to break thread.  I'm pretty happy with the way the quilting looks on the front of the quilt, entirely random from that perspective.

At 7 months, Petey isn't exactly into his quilt yet, but I'm sure the time will come.