4-patch Baby Quilt!

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, several of my friends got married.  Now they are producing little humans!  Time to make people quilts.  However, I have scant patience for stereotypical "baby" quilts... I don't like washed out pastels, toy or cloud motifs, flannel, or appliqués!  (If I were fonder of appliqué work, I might be done my Dandelion quilt by now!)  Instead, I am playing with patchwork, and enjoying the opportunity to play with color schemes I might not otherwise choose, in small sizes!  I like the idea of the baby still using the quilt as they grow, long after the cutesy stuff is consigned to memorabilia.  Today, I share a quilt for a co-worker who is adopting.  The colors work for boy or girl. 

NEUTRAL 4-PATCH

She de-stashed in my general direction!

This quilt came partly-made.  A friend of a friend was experimenting with quilting, and made a bunch of 4-patches in a dusty-yellow and avocado-green color scheme.  I think she must've bought a jellyroll, because other scraps in the same bag were in long, 2.5" wide strips, and all cut with a serrated blade.  Said friend-of-a-friend decided quilting wasn't for her but the peripatetic life of an RV-dwelling online-law-student(!) was, so the 4-patches came to me. 

I spent an exciting evening laying out a quilt top, and another two days assembling it, putting a border on it (a good chance to even up disparities of width/length), and making a backing that included more of the 4-patches.  I think the red border really livens up the colors and gives definition to a sea of squares.  The corner triangles (triangles and not squares because of a fabric shortage in my stash!) combined with the border make me think of a Churn Dash block. 

I used the envelope method (described in greater detail in my Cricket in the Congo post) to enclose all the edges, and started quilting it on my home machine Boudica.  Then I got frustrated because the bobbin thread kept getting (somehow, I don't know how!) wrapped around the shaft inside the bobbin casing, ruining the tension and forcing me to break the thread to release the quilt from the machine.  Grrr!  My quilting mentor finished the quilting on her machine, once I'd batted my eyes!  ;) 

layout of top

back of quilt

My favorite part is how, because I was careful with layout and pinning, the back squares are close enough in position to the front squares that the quilted lines neatly bisect them both.

Before giving the quilt away, I washed and dried it to free it of cat hair and give it a cozy crinkly texture.