The curse is definately over!

Just like the legendary curse of the Bambino that kept the Boston Red Sox from winning the World Series, my family has had a bit of a 'Bambino' curse on it as well.  If you've read my April post, "Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice" you'll learn that our family was in a bit of a drought when it came to having baby girls.  Don't get me wrong, we love all our baby boys... but a little girl once in a while evens things out.  Well, that curse was broken by my Nephew's baby girl born in June of 2011.  To prove that the curse is gone for good, a month ago my niece and her husband welcomed another baby girl into our family.  On January 25th, Elena [my mother's namesake] was born and I became a Great Aunt for the 7th time, this project is a gift to welcome her.

The project began like they all do, with a color scheme.  The baby's room was decorated with pink, green, creme and red.  I had some fabrics in mind for the next baby quilt from within the scads and scads of stashed fabrics in my bins.  However, for this project I wanted to choose fabrics that I didn't already have.  I wanted to try to mix a very traditional block pattern with some more modern looking fabrics.  I was very excited about each of the fabrics that I purchased for this quilt.  What I wasn't thrilled about was how they looked together when I 'mocked' up the petals next to each other.

I had arranged them on my cutting table and walked around them for days.  Kind of the way that you would if you were attempting to choose a paint color and you paint some wall segments and then see how it is to live with that color.  I knew I wanted to use the same block design as last Novembers' 'Dresden' block of the week.  I was counting on the pointed 'petal' look to create a field of what would look like flowers.  Only trouble was, when I put all 4 fabrics together I hated the result... It just looked like I was forcing fabrics and prints that didn't work very well together.

 I know it seems simple and obvious but I had in my head that the 20 petals would be created with a repeating pattern of these 4 fabrics.  I put them in every possible order and stared at them forever until the light bulb turned on over my head and I decided to separate them and create two different Dresden plate designs; one pink and one green to complement each other.





By separating the fabrics into two color schemes I also had an automatically defined layout for this quilt top.  Kept this design very simple since the prep work for each 'petal' as far as cutting, assembling and stitching them down onto the background colors has a bit more steps then usual piecing.

For the green 'flowers' I edge quilted the petal points and for the pink I quilted the straight lines ('stitch in the ditch' style) onto the background color and for the points I hand stitched them down.  I hadn't planned on using different methods for each color, but I think the result adds interest. 

I had planned on finishing this quilt off with a satin binding which I think would work out great for a baby quilt.  Then I remembered that baby quilts get a lot of baby messes on them and as a result get washed a lot.  I wasn't certain how satin binding would hold up as opposed to cotton so I stuck with a rolled one sided cotton binding extended from the back of the quilt.

More in-process photos and the finished project can be found within "Quilt Gallery 2".