This is the baby quilt I worked on during the retreat. As I mentioned in that entry, my goal was to get it ready to present at the baby shower Friday evening. By spending time on it both before and after work every day, I managed to get it basted, quilted, and bound in time, though I needed pretty much every minute I had available—the last stitches went into the binding on Friday morning.

It wouldn’t have taken quite so long if I had used fusible batting like I have on most of my recent quilts, but I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t have any fusible batts of the right size on hand. Instead, I used something new to me which had caught my eye when it was on sale a while back at JoAnn: EcoCraft, which is touted as more environmentally friendly than polyester batting. It’s made from a fiber that’s derived from corn, which doesn’t seem nearly as strange to me as it would have if I hadn’t already made socks from corn. The non-fusibleness of it meant I pin basted, which takes a while even for a smallish quilt like this one. It quilted nicely—a lot like a thin poly batt. I hope it holds up over the years.

Though I auditioned many possibilities from my stash, I could not find just the right fabric for the binding, so I bought yardage for that. I was so restrained in the quilt shop—only bought two candidates for the binding and one half yard of Fairy Frost in a color that I didn’t think I had already. The one I ended up using is from the Quilters Tweed line by Kaufman, and I was so pleased with it. The pattern nicely camouflages the joins between strips as well as the stitching on the back (I finished the binding by machine). That was the only fabric I bought for this quilt—the focus fabric we started with, all the prints I used for the block borders, almost all of the quilt borders (I incorporated some pieces from two of the ladies who gave me the extras from their blocks, which helped tie things together more), and the backing were from my stash.

The only thing I didn’t get done before the shower was a label, which I decided was okay since the baby isn’t here yet. I did make a paper label and safety pinned that on with a promise to replace it with a proper one with the baby’s name on it once she’s arrived and we know her name and can include her picture.

I’m happy to report that the mom-to-be loved the quilt; she called it “amazing”. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I do like how it turned out.