Monday, September 9, 2013

the panda quilts: #19: turquoise & peach circle quilt


looks like i'm finally back on track and blogging about these baby quilts in real time. i finished this one up last week & presented it to the mom-to-be at her baby shower last saturday. i realized that i've shipped away more quilts than i've given in person...and this made me aware of the fact that i get butterflies whenever the recipient opens the gift. i wonder if i am alone in this, or if this is a common phenomenon when people give handmade gifts? regardless, i believe it was well-received by my sweet friend & i hope her baby girl snuggles on it for years to come.

knowing full well that i'd make her a quilt, i had my friend look at my fabric stash while visiting my house to see what sort of colors or prints she was drawn to. with that in mind, i decided to go with turquoise and peach as the main colors for this one.

back when i took quilting 101 with alexia abegg, "the saucer block" was one of the ones we learned in class for our sampler quilt.   the sampler quilt lives on our couch (it's the go-to tv-watching lap quilt around here)...the saucer block has remained my favorite block, so i thought i'd re-visit it for this quilt.
alexia has a pattern for a similar circle quilt in her book "liberty love," so that also proved to be a source of inspriation. (it's called the "goodnight fairy tale quilt" in the book). however, in class we made 12" squares, so i used that template rather than the one she provides in the book (which yields a 10" square).  alexia uses subtle cream/neutral prints for the background, so i did the same (a cute moda fabric + some leftover heather bailey from my first quilt). i pulled the various turquoise and peach prints from my stash bin for the saucer centers.
the blocks came together with relative ease (although those curves were a little trickier than i remember!) i added a border (kona snow) & i think it ended up around 40"x40".  good ole straight horizontal lines for the quilting, and lizzy house pearl bracelet for the binding.