A Baby Waits For No Man

Two more this spring, both boys.  I'm having a hard time keeping up with all these new babies, but I do my best!  I wasn't going to go blue for these two- I had a total red and turquoise color scheme in mind, but sometimes my fabric fantasies are a season behind.  I started out with this Heaven and Helsinki fabric from Michael Miller because I love it:

I'm enjoying smaller quilts these days; good for cribs and strollers and playing on the floor when you haven't bothered to vacuum in awhile (in my defense, I'm not the one throwing cottage cheese around).  So these boys both got simple quilts.  I've been experimenting with more embroidery lately, and I wanted to incorporate that.  This was definitely a project where more work went into the embroidery than into the half-square triangles.  The pattern is from Little Stitches by Aneela Hoey.  She does the sweetest simple drawings (check out the one I embroidered on "your sister has curls").

This was for my college roommate (and so much more) who just had baby Mateo in March:

I used the kite-flyer pattern Aneela quilted in the book - of course 3/4 of the way through the embroidery I spilled ice tea on it, leaving a big stain.  So the kite had to be a bit bigger and lower than originally planned.  In order to keep the drawing centered on the white square I'd already cut down, I added some birdies.

I got panicky about time and cheated with some appliqued jeans.  With the embroidery I was trying to get my stitches too look like real chunky yarn on the sweater

and a lot of effort went into trying to get his hair to look like it was really windswept.

For the back, I used a fluffy bathrobe material, but I wish I'd used Minky.  This was really thick to quilt with, the needle kept bringing the blue fur through the batting, so I kept it as simple as possible.  I finished M's quilt second and by then I'd worked up the nerve to try my own satin binding instead of Wright's.  I miscalculated so it's not nearly as wide as I wanted it to be, but it had a much more finished look since I bound it blind-stitch style.  I'd do it this way again if I have to do another baby quilt. Don't you like the way I say that like maybe all my friends are magically done procreating?

and with the happy family:

The second one was for a good friend/favorite old co-worker who gave birth to baby Z THIS MORNING (which I know because I just texted her - yes I'm that friend that calls/texts when you're in labor with no respect for personal space).  For hers I worked up the nerve to do my own embroidery pattern.  I still can't draw, but I gathered together a bunch of different images and I traced/sketched them to get this little guy who, I now notice, is a little out of proportion:

This is a horrible picture, but sometimes a gray day and an Iphone just don't mix:

The point is, I was really proud of the french knots for his hair - though if I had it to do again I would've used just one or two strands instead of three, and I would do a million of them.  But who knows, by the time he's ten maybe the jheri curl will be back in style.

I bound Z's first, and used Wrights. I'm still a whiner about the texture of it, but I do really like the color - I couldn't find satin quite this shade for Mateo's quilt.

Alright, back to the salt mines.