While I was planning the pink heart quilt (a.k.a. my startled chicken quilt), my former colleague emailed me to ask if I could also make a quilt for a baby boy–her other daughter was expecting in February! I scoured the Internets again for inspiration and found another adorable mini-quilt  adorable mini-quilt that I could scale up to a baby quilt and adapt to the colours my former colleague requested.

Now, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal and have all sorts of things to say about gender colour assignation, but since this was for a paying client, I guess it isn’t really my business–I just don’t want you all to judge me for falling into gender clichés!

With that out of the way, let’s talk quilts. Particularly, let’s talk about square quilts. What you need to know is that I love them. Love, love, love them. If we were to have a debate right now about nesting seams vs. sliced bread, you can pretty well be sure what side of the argument I’d fall on. So I got to work cutting up whatever blues, creams, and whites I had to put this quilt together. I bought an Accuquilt for this very purpose, but decided to use the roller and mat to cut this time, to try to work on my accuracy in cutting, since sometimes working quickly comes at the expense of working accurately. I probably spent more time arranging the pieces on this quilt than cutting them, but I wanted to make sure that the gradation from dark to light was subtle and that there weren’t any pieces blatantly out of place.

Piecing took no time at all–I had the whole quilt pieced in about an hour. Kiwi helped.

She had a traumatic visit at the vet’s that morning. You could say she was feeling… blue! (yeah, yeah, tip your waitress, yada-yada.)

I had some of the same problems with the quilting that I had for the startled chicken quilt. While the quilting on this was much simpler than the chicken quilt, I was still getting some skipped stitches (but again, this got sorted by replacing the needle). I stitched straight diagonal lines about a quarter inch from the centre diagonal line of each piece.

Finished quilt.

To get the lines more or less straight, I initially used a water-soluble pen to mark the diagonal, but this was going to be less effective on the darker squares, so after marking about four of the diagonals, I switched to the Clover Hera marker,  which marks a crease in the fabric rather than applying ink to it. I bought the hera a while back, but this was the first time I’d used it and it was perfect for the job. I initially planned to also quilt on either side of the ditch, for a super-pimped crosshatch pattern, but after finishing the plain double-crosshatch I figured it looked lovely as is. I used Aurifil 4663 40wt thread for the quilting, a variegated light blue.

Quilt top detail.

The backing and binding are both from Mo Bedell’s Full Moon Lagoon, in a beautiful aqua shade.

Love how that crosshatch looks on the back.

You can see in the picture below that my machine binding still needs a bit of work, but overall I’m quite pleased with it. I can only imagine it’ll improve with time.

Backing and binding detail. I adjusted the stitch length after a couple of rows–my machine defaults to 1.8 and I always forget to change it.

While this wasn’t a particularly challenging quilt to make, it is one of my favourites so far. I love the colour play in it. I hope my former colleague is as pleased with it as I am!

Entering this one in the two-colour quilt category for Blogger’s Quilt Festival. I debated whether to put this one into the baby quilt category or the two-colour category, and went with the latter, since the challenge for me in this quilt was making the colour work effectively.