Three requests

In about 5 weeks or so my brother and his wife will be welcoming their first child, a baby boy. The color scheme of the baby’s bedroom is based on a soft minty color that has a grey undertone. They gave me a color swatch in the form of a the paint stick they had used and asked me to match it in a baby quilt.

I was able to match it pretty perfectly! Yay for big fabric stashes!

Most of my fabric stash is actually made up out of Fat Quarters, so I can add a lot of color variation in a project, but that also meant that I couldn’t do a pattern with bigger blocks units.

Beside using a specific color, the parents-to-be had a second request, namely that the quilt itself wasn’t too busy in pattern. After some further Pinterest investigations we settled on a Zig Zag patchwork pattern. To add a bit of contrast within the very similar colors and tones, I added some white fabrics.

Their third request was the use of a specific quilting pattern constructed out of overlapping circles. The mother has special memories connected to this flower pattern that she drew often with her grandfather. I lucked out that I actually had a fabric (white-on-white) that shows this circle pattern. Many of you may know it as the Flower of Life pattern. Beside using the white fabric, I will of course add this flower to the quilt by free motion quilting ruler work.

Image by Tomruen, ‘ Flower of Life construction, 1-7 circles’, 27 September 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlapping_circles_grid#/media/File:Flower-construction.svg

Most of the fabrics in my selection are blenders, fabrics that read as a solid from a distance and that have a small scale pattern. They are my favorite to collect.

Some of the fabrics had a directional print that I wanted to ‘honor’, and so preserving the calmness in the whole design. I immediately opted out of a Half Square Triangle or Flying Geese construction for the Zig Zag, as I just didn’t want to hassle with triangle piecing and additional trimming.

Construction the Zig Zag pattern out of diagonal strips (basically alternating squares and rectangles), made it possible to keep the fabric directional.

I had cut the rectangles for the last row, the blue one, a bit too big and had a bit of waste because of that. But on a whole, there were just some triangles on the edges to get rid off. Considering the speed of construction versus fabric waste, I would take this route again. The only thing I would do differently next time, is adding a line of stitching 1/8 inch from the edge to prevent stretching the bias edges.

Since constructing this top, I have done a bit or research into Zig Zag quilts and their various construction methods. Would you be interested in knowing more about that?

Hugs

Esther

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