Strawberry Fields for Breakfast

Laying out the petals was the hardest part.

A few months ago, I expressed the wish that people would have more babies, just so I could make more quilts. Well, I don’t know if that is the whole reason, but some people have obliged me. My awe-inspiring SIL and her husband are expecting in October, and I have been spending some afternoons in the basement sewing up an appliqued top. It’s better in the basement, since we don’t have air conditioning- I’ll sew, and the kids play with legos, and I’ll come up periodically to refill my iced tea and just be blasted by the heat.

I couldn’t find any patterns I liked, so I just imagined this one. I love the high contrast of the purple and red over the cream.  I also love that the cream has a very subtle pattern on it. Is it a flower exploding? Fireworks? The Girl thought the explosion should be centered, but I like the asymmetricality of it and the way the quilting lines flow off the petals. I mean sparks.

I just finished the binding this afternoon, and love how the red finishes up and ties it all together.

My math and my memory were way off when I bought the fabric for the back-I only got a yard of the dark blue with sparkly stars print. My solution was to add a panel of pieces from the front, an idea I got from a library book called “Quilts, Baby!” by Linda Kopp.

My backing fabric wound up 6 inches too short, so I added a panel of patchwork.

I probably wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t seen it in the book, but when I first saw it while reading, I wondered why anyone would cut up perfectly good fabric on purpose, just to sew it back together. It is a question I ask myself regularly about quilting, actually. And yet here I am quilting…

I can haz bed for kitteh?

On a related note, there were so many scraps of purples and reds that I made the Hellcat a bed. It hasn’t prevented her from sleeping on the guest bed pillow, though. Sorry, Mom. I’ll change the pillowcase before you come.