a baby quilt with 123s and ABCs

so the blog has been light on craft postings for the summer. partly I haven't been spending as much time sewing. but I also chose to take on the most difficult quilt project I have done yet. but after months of puttering, I have finally finished it.

I started by taking some fabrics from the stash - some Flea Market Fancy in lime green that I had bought to be a back for the Plain Spoken but didn't use, some duck fabric from an antique mall trip in Terre Haute, and some yellow and green cat fabric from an antique mall.

I added in two Japanese fabrics - one with numbers and one with the three bears.

And then I decided to design some of my own embroidery squares, an anthropomorphic acorn for A, a bunny for B, cherries for C, a dog for D, an eggplant for E, and a flower for F. I drew them with disappearing ink and then did a simple greenwork split stitch over top. I haven't drawn in years, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

then I decided to make my own pattern for a 3-D block design. I must have made an error at some point in my calculations, as adding a quarter inch border to my planned block size left me with squares that were too large in assembling the pieces. so there are some squirrely joints where some of the blocks meet. (I have gained a new respect for traditional quilts with six pointed stars. getting six corners to meet in a reasonable way is quite hard.)

to quilt it, I ended up quilting inside the yellow tops of the blocks in yellow and inside the green sides in green thread. It took longer than my usual straight-across kind of quilting, but I really like how it looks.

so here it is!


a close up of E:


showing the back fabric...