Cara’s Baby Shower Quilt – first finish for 2015!

During the last week of 2014, I  had some time off from work and I spent lots of time in my studio mostly working on a quilt for my friend Cara.

Cara has been on the journey for adoption for a while now and at Thanksgiving her dream came true when Baby Logan made her a Mom.

A group of friends started planning a baby shower to welcome baby Logan and shower Cara with some love to show how happy we are for her.

Of course I volunteered to make a quilt so my proposal for friends to send me a quote or a greeting they would like to add to the quilt, I would digitize in Art and Stitch  and then  I would  use my embroidery machine to stitch them out. These blocks would then become part of the quilt.

The theme for the shower and then the quilt was –  ZOO so I immediately searched for zoo fabric and found 2D Zoo pool by Alexander Henry  which was just perfect. Here is it

I also got to look at a two pictures that Cara liked as an inspiration for Logan’s nursery and I minute I saw the photos I knew the above fabric was the right one to pick!

 

I went to buy the fabric and couldn’t find it anywhere but after a longer search I found the white version above and also a version with a blue background on 2 separate Etsy stores.  Each were selling a yard cut and I messaged them to see if they had more and lucky they did!  I ordered the white version to use on the quilt top and the blue for the backing. Based on the nursery pictures I  decided a medium grey solid would work best for the background fabric and I just needed to decide what solid fabric I could uses to stitch out the quotes. I decided to shop my stash first and came across a half set of Laura Gunn fat quarters with colors that were just perfect. Here is the fabric I started out with:

 

Slowly but surely, the quotes can in and I think I spent nearly 2 days digitizing then all  as I love playing with Art and Stitch it was great for me to learn more about digitizing text.

Here are some of the quotes as they looked in Art and Stitch

I worked on over 20 different quotes and it took about 3 days to stitch them out. Here are a few more of the wonderful quotes:

Final I got to to a point of being able to decide how to layout the quilt and played with the fabric on my design wall and very quickly it went from this:

 

To this:

To finally loaded on my longarm:

 

For quilting I decided to use an edge to edge curls and swirls design to give some nice texture. I used a Quilters dream poly batting which gave wonderful definition for the quilting

For binding I used the backing fabric and about 1:30 am the morning of the shower I did the last hand stitch to finalize the quilt.

The best part of the whole experience was seeing Cara’s response when she opened the quilt up. There were tears of joy which showed me that the quilt will be cherished and loved.

 

 

 

 

Next day we got this wonderful message from Cara:

I read all the blocks on the quilt last night and bawled my eyes out.

It means the world to me for Logan to have something that literally tells him how much he is loved and wanted. One of my biggest fears about adoption has been that he knows and understands how much he’s loved by Colin and I, our extended families , his birth family, and our family of friends.

I just never want him to question that., This certainly should help him know and understand that. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing such lovely thoughts and Leona for sewing it with such talent.

This is the reason why I quilt – sharing the love! I just know it will be loved and cherished. It was a wonderful experience working on this quilt and I look forward to seeing pictures of Logan using it as he grows up – he too is cherished and loved by so many!