My friend Marissa is awesome. For many reasons. One of them is that she knows I’m a fabric junkie and she enables me. She brought me a whole stack of fabric the last time she visited that came from a stash she had inherited. She picked out everything that was pink and/or particularly loud to give to me. Like I said, she’s awesome. (I’ve made mother/daughter pajamas from some of what she gave me). One of the fabrics was this amazing rainbow zebra cotton broadcloth. Marissa was pregnant at the time and not-so-subtly hinted that she would be super happy to have a baby blanket made from the zebra fabric (and who needs subtlety between friends anyway).
Well, I took her “hint” and made a baby blanket for her brand-new munchkin! I decided to make it a whole-cloth quilt (meaning no cutting and piecing to make the quilt top) and quilt it on my mom’s longarm quilting machine. This is the first quilt that I’ve finished on a longarm (I’m half-way through my 2012 BOM quilt that I’ll finish someday, I swear) and I had a lot of fun with it! I kept the quilting really simple since I’m a total n00b at longarm quilting (though I fortunately had my expert mom standing by to help me when the tension decided to act up). I think the rainbow thread is exactly what the simple quilting needed to make it really pop (all credit goes to my mom for having it in her thread stash).
I remember buying the fabric I used for the back for a very particular reason, but I have no recollection of what that reason was so I used it for the quilt back since I wanted a fabric that brought out the rainbow (and already being in my stash was a major bonus). The binding is left over from the Fancy Forest Pillows that I made for Evelyn. I was delighted to know that Marissa loves the quilt, and even more delighted that I got to meet her little babe in person right after he came home!
The post Rainbow Zebra Baby Quilt is by Tuesday Stitches. If you have found it elsewhere, please let her know!
