Slowly plugging along pays off!

Lately, I’ve been more in the mood to sewclothing than quilting so the Bright Hopes baby quilt has been slow-going but a little stitching most nights has paid off.  The little quilt is finished!

The Bright Hopes pattern was found online when I searched for a simple quilt to make for a pregnant distant relative.  When I began cutting the fabric, the baby’s gender was unknown so I chose to go with a gender neutral color scheme.  Since then, we’ve discovered a boy is expected.  Thankfully, the quilt is not overly pink!

The center of each block is the palest mottled off white with scrappy strips all around.  The individual blocks finished at 5½” square and were machine pieced on my Singer 66 treadle (circa 1925).  Fortunately, I have a stash of 2½” strips so piecing was as easy as it gets.  The narrow dark green border is a little less than an inch and the outer pale green border is less than 3″.  The corners are mitered.

The light green backing from my fabric stash was not quite wide enough to do the job so I added a pieced stacked bricks strip down the middle.  This adds enough interest to make the quilt reversible.  The label is hand embroidered.

I chose to quilt the blocks with a square-in-a-square design using YLI variegated pastel thread.  The pale green border is quilted using a meandering vine with stylized leaves and tulips.  The vine and leaves were quilted using dark green YLI thread and the tulips were done in dark red YLI thread.  The thread color is very subtle done in small stitches.

I bound the quilt with a narrow green batik binding.  I love the narrow bindings I’ve used recently as they give a quilt a clean finish without the appearance of an additional border.

The finished quilt measures 42½” x 48½”.

Shirl