Another Baby Quilt: Preview

A couple of years ago, I posted a photo of a baby quilt I made for my first grandchild. I documented the making of it here.

My daughter really loves the quilt I made for little Nora, and now there is another grandchild on the way. Once again it is time to review the techniques of making a traditional quilt.

I turned to a favourite approach, as detailed in the book "Spectacular Scraps", by Judy Hooworth and Margaret Rolfe. I like to use up scraps of cloth: they provide lots of interesting variety and visual texture. And it's satisfying to use up what I have on hand.

The designs in this book are all based on the half-square triangle. The idea is to make many small squares, each of them composed of two triangles: in this case, one triangle is blue, and the other is gold or tan. The colours were chosen by my daughter. Blue and gold can be seen as complementary colours: certainly blue is considered to be cool, with gold being warm.

The blues range from very light to very dark, and the golds extend to tans.

Here are some of the triangles, ready to be assembled into squares...

... like so.

Here's the quilt top, up on the design wall.
By using a full range of blues, very light to very dark, the pattern
becomes less obvious: it almost shimmers. I like that effect.

The construction of this baby quilt did not go smoothly. At one point my sewing machine actually fell apart, and it was impossible to find a repair technician. I had to borrow a machine from a kind friend. 

As I write this, the quilt top is "batted up", layered with batting and backing, and ready to machine-quilt. I will be sure to post a photo when it's finished. Soon!