Well, a couple of you have asked how I came up with the design for the baby "Moomin quilt." The finished result was actually not planned at all, it was a long process of trial and error, and this is how it happened... ..LOL!
Quilt quality fabric is very hard to find around here, but I first found a very nice cotton fabric with Moomins on it. The Moomins are fictional characters, and vastly popular among small kids here, and the mother of the coming baby absolutely loves them too. I also found another tan and white fabric that I thought would go well with the Moomins. I figured the white and tan colors would be good since I didn't know the sex of the baby.
Well, so far so good. Then I had to decide on a way to "display" the small Moomins. After hours and hours browsing quilting web sites, I eventually settled for the churn dash. So, I obviously needed a third fabric. I had a fat quarter of a black and white fabric that I thought was really nice, and made a test block:
I absolutely loved it! But then, of course, I couldn't find any more of the black and white fabric - not in Sweden, and not on the many searches I did on the internet. Seemed that more people than me had loved it...
Eventually, I came across the polka dot black and white on the internet, and eventually decided it was probably even better than my first choice. So, I set out to make 25 churn dash blocks, thinking I would just sew them together in rows of five, to make it look like this (but bigger):
Once they were done and laid out, I didn't like the overall look at all. Without sashing, the churn dashes crated another pattern that I didn't want. So, I bought some more of the black and white polka dot fabric, and thought I'd make wide sashing strips out of them, and only use nine of the blocks. But, obviously, the look was even worse than without any sashing at all:
So, I was stuck and started on another quilt instead...LOL!
But, with the baby approaching I realised I had to come up with a new idea. I started to think that very very narrow black strips, in the middle of sashing made up of the background fabric, might solve the problem. It would have loooked like thin grid lines around all blocks, and I thought that might look cool. But, I wanted the strips to be very thin (1/4 inch finished size) and I just couldn't figure out how to make them meet in the corners between the blocks, so decided in the end that I'd have to make cornerstones with something else in them.
Thought about diamonds, but then it occured to me: why not try applique? I'd never done that before, but was inspired by all the applique talk here on the forum. I thought hearts would be a nice soft shape to break with the hard edges of the churn dashes. So, made a small heart template, read all the threads here about applique, and made 16 small hearts for the cornerstone pieces.
Then for the border... The curling ribbon border that grammy65 had made (shown in one of her posts) really inspired me, but, again, the big problem was finding a second fabric that would go with the polka dots. This was my first attempt, which I didn't like:
So, I tried stripes instead, which I also didn't like:
Then, in the end, I decided to sacrifice the fat quarter I had put aside for another quilt (the fabric was to become butterfly bodies) because it just seemed to be the best I could find:
I finished it off by quilting all the black areas in the ditch (including the hearts, which obviously didn't really have a ditch and which made me worried that my hand stiching will not really withstand multiple washings...), and stippled the background areas.
And, as I already posted in the other thread, I was very happy with the result. Of course, no one who has read this post this far would ever doubt that, LOL! I hope others will want to post similar stories, so that I'm not the only one who overshares lenghty quilt-process-stories...LOL!
Ha, ha, can you tell that I have no one around me who's interested in hearing about my quilitng...
