For colors, I wanted a combination that would be easy for my friend to love while still being great for a baby boy, so I used light blue, green, burnt orange, and a grey with red-ish blue undertones. (Red-ish blue is the boy-friendly term for purple. Similarly, pink is called "light red"). I double-checked the colors with my husband, and he said, after a short pause "It's masculine... for a baby." That means yes... right?
AGH, I have one big regret with this quilt. I really meant for the grey bits to pop as an orange peel-ish design element, but I messed up by using two grey fabrics that were too light in value and didn't match the third. Value is so tricky! It is easy to just focus on color and forget how value will effect which parts of the design stand out.
I knew about it when I put the cut fabrics up on my design wall, but I was in a rush to mail the quilt before baby arrived so I plunged ahead hoping that the greys would magically "blend" when sewn. Bad call, but I still love the quilt the way it turned out.
The back is fabric from an Ikea duvet cover (yay for cheap!), and I did organic straight line quilting. Actually, I made quite a few errors on this quilt. I overcut on my print triangles... by a lot. Really a lot. When I have my blocks sewn in quarters, I checked one with a ruler and decided that I was good to go and the blocks didn't need trimming before I continued. Wrong-o! Half of them needed trimming, and I just happened to pull one of the half that did not. I ended up with a bunch of wavy blocks, and I had to take them apart and trim them. Good thing it was just a baby size quilt!
My cutting error turned out well in the end. Since I had so many extra triangles cut, I was able to cut a strip from each one of them and make a super scrappy binding that I just looooove. Wait, here it is in full glory:
I'm practicing my "pretty quilt pictures." I always like to see a full-on straight view of a quilt, but especially if the quilt is big, sometimes that doesn't give you a very realistic picture of what the quilt is like. If anybody has suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em!