I've been working on a "Rainbow Baby Quilt" for a friend of my daughter that is pregnant with a baby girl and is due this month sometime!
My daughter told me that her friend had seen this quilt online and really liked it. However, the free pattern on that blog was for a much smaller baby quilt than I like to make AND it was missing the INDIGO of the rainbow. You remember the ROYGBIV of the rainbow, right? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, INDIGO, violet. My kids had to memorize that for school and to this day I can recite it with ease! LOL
Anyway, I could have just made the free pattern and made the blocks bigger to make a bigger quilt, but that still would have left out the indigo part of it. And if I added three rows of indigo, it left me with a white blob over to the left hand lower corner.
So I drafted my own pattern and went with it. :)
All fabrics for the front were pulled from my stash...no new ones were purchased for this quilt! YIPPEE!
I love scrap quilts, but my daughter told me that her friend doesn't really care for "scrappy", so I only used one fabric of each color instead of scrapping it up! However, I did decide to bind with a scrappy binding using the leftover fabric! Hey, you can only hold me back just so much! LOL A scrappy-quilting girl's gotta do what a scrappy-quilting girl's gotta do, right?
I machine quilted this quilt on my new Juki TL2000Qi and boy does that machine sew fast! It made short work of this quilt and it was pretty easy to keep my stitches uniform!
For the backing I used a yellow and white striped 100% cotton sheet from Pottery Barn that I found at a thrift store while in Tennessee! People often ask about using sheets for quilt backs and I tell them that I ONLY use them if the quilt is going to be machine quilted. They are just too tightly woven to hand-quilt through. They do make a great backing for a machine-quilted quilt, though....especially for a baby quilt as sheets hold up very well through all the washings that baby quilts go through. I don't use sheets all the time, but I do keep my eyes out at thrift stores, yard sales, etc., for sheets that are 100% cotton, in a neutral print (I love stripes for this reason), and are in good shape without any fading.
Loretta
As a former Rainbow Girl (Masonic daughters), I learned to include indigo, too! After all, that's the color of the blue in our flag, so we need it. Your quilt is a real treasure for the mother and child and if she doesn't quite appreciate how much design consideration and work you did, well, WE do, in the blogosphere, LOL!
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