Ellie's Quilt

My friends, Vanessa and Darren, recently welcomed a sweet little baby daughter, Ellie, into the world, and I'm so excited, and happy that I can finally reveal the quilt I made for her. 

Ellie's early arrival meant the baby shower had to be cancelled at the last minute, and this, along with her needing to stay a little longer in hospital, has meant that I've had to keep this finished quilt under wraps until now - and you can imagine how difficult that was for me!

I designed and made her a cot-sized quilt using some of my prettiest, girly fabrics featuring raw edge appliqué bunting.

And since Barney the dachshund is already part of Ellie's family I included him too. Quilting that green 'grass' on my domestic sewing machine was great fun as I love the texture that machine quilting creates.

The swirls of quilting on the rest of the quilt are meant to suggest breezy eddies among the bunting flags.

Come over here where it's shadier.

Ah, that's better. Sunshine is wonderful for showing up quilting lines, but a tad too bright to look at for long.

For my photo shoot in the local park I took Ellie's quilt to a shady glade of trees.

A great advantage of using the 'no tails' binding method is that I can use multiple fabrics in my binding because it's easy to stop and start with precision wherever I want, changing the binding fabric to match the quilt top fabric, or the changing colours in the bunting. Neat, eh?

Finally, I created a label in Word and printed it onto a Printed Treasures fabric sheet. Lately I've been attaching a fabric frame to my labels too, before slip stitching them onto the quilt back.

Sometimes I have a little trouble pushing my needle through the Printed Treasures sheets, so machining the fabric frame on first gives me a softer edge to hand stitch through. 

I also love the look!

It's a wrap - finally!