Woodland baby quilt

How I do love a finish!  And this one was overdue, so it's especially sweet.

Woodland is a commission baby quilt, the first commission I've accepted.  I finished piecing the quilt top a little over a month ago, the day before Eleni was born.  Today, at long last, I found time to quilt and bind it.  Yay!

My client provided her own fabrics and embroideries and shared some photos of favorite quilts.  With these inspirations, I chose a quilt design that appealed to me.  I incorporated some of my own fabrics too, to help express my vision for the work.

The hardest part, by far, was choosing a quilt design (or basically getting started!).  She likes asymmetrical design, but I kept being drawn to repeating quilt block styles.  As a compromise I created asymmetry with careful placement of value (light vs. dark fabrics) in the quilt blocks. The way the colors create different shapes and so much movement - well, that's my favorite part about the quilt and certainly wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had the asymmetrical "assignment."

Some have asked if I'll do more commissions in the future, but I think not.  Just like anyone else, I prefer creating from within without any constraints.  It was much harder than I had thought it would be to incorporate her embroidery.  The combination of aiming for asymmetry and using the embroidery had me stumped for a good while.  That said, challenges are always learning experiences.  Now that it's finished, I'll just focus on that!

I chose to free motion quilt Woodland with a chrysanthemum design, which made it easy to avoid the embroidery.  Didn't want to quilt over that pretty hand work!  I think the back makes a nice contrastto the front, and it's always great the way solids show off quilting. 

All right, this is off to my patient client.  And now, I have exactly 1 day left to finish that Easter dress.  I know I'm not alone!

Enjoy your weekends!

xo,

Rachel