As you can see from the photos, I did finish the baby quilts for my baby grandnieces which I wrote about earlier this month. I sewed the labels on with a few days to spare before I was heading to Chicagoland, where one of the babies lives. The other baby lives in California, and since I’m not sure when I’ll get out there again, the plan was to ship her quilt so it would get there the same day that I was going to be in Illinois presenting the one to her cousin. So I boxed it up and mailed it off. It wasn’t until I was packing for Illinois that I realized I SENT THE ILLINOIS BABY’S QUILT TO CALIFORNIA! I couldn’t believe I’d been so dumb and distracted and inattentive. Each quilt has a label sewn to it with the baby’s picture and name! How hard would it have been to double check? Not hard at all, yet did I? Nope. I berated myself for a bit, then consulted with Mr. Karen and decided to take the wrong quilt with me so the family could see it, explain the funny story of my screwup (I hoped it would be funny to me by then), take the quilt back and send it to the right place with money for the postage to send the other where it belonged. I texted the niece who was getting the package in California and when I knew she was fine with the situation, I felt much better.

All that aside, I am happy with how the quilts turned out. I used the pattern Brave New World from the book Even More Quilts for Baby by Ursula Reikes. Of course I couldn’t resist using about three times the number of prints as the pattern called for, which added time to the design process—since that’s my favorite part, that was fine by me. The color scheme was based on the fabrics that my mom and I had picked out together at a little quilt shop in Clark Fork, Idaho when she came out to our condo last summer. Those were predominately orange and yellow and green and brown. I ended up using the brown one for the backs of the quilts; since I didn’t have a pattern in mind when we bought the fabrics, I didn’t have enough for both backs, so pieced in a strip of the other two main prints we’d bought, which makes it more interesting that if I had had enough.

These quilts were on my felt wall a long time, what with work and ski season and suck taking up so much of my time. Here’s a progress shot at the end of January, with the borders in their original state, before I flipped the fabrics between the quilts to balance the colors better.

There are some detail shots on Flickr, too; just click on one of the photos and look around my photostream. They’re all next to each other so you shouldn’t have to look too hard.

I think these might be the last baby quilts I do for a while. I know I had some other ones on my list, but those babies are all ancient now (walking and talking, and some are even in preschool) so it seems way too late. Purple Systems has gotten so big that I’m not up on all the new arrivals before they get here the way I used to be, so the coworker baby quilts are a thing of the past, I think. Though I suppose I should go over my list again just to make sure I’m not missing something important before I get out my Nancy Crow seminar leftovers and start improvising.