Caroline's Animal Quilt

Here is the quilt I made for my daughter's arrival.  As with our first, we did not know ahead of time whether she was going to be a boy or a girl, so I had to design something that was gender-neutral.

I drafted this up on graph paper first (I still didn't have Electric Quilt at this time). I started it in the spring 2008 and finished it, like James' quilt, a day or two before she was born. I machine pieced all the squares, triangles, and borders. The animals are all hand appliqued, and I did hand quilting on this as well.

To do the animals, I first made a list of ideas, then I started searching through all my quilting books and magazines. For animals I couldn't find a good pattern for, I used the Internet to find pictures that I could make work. I used my copier to get the animals to the correct size for the quilt.
I'm pretty sure I didn't purchase any fabric specifically for this quilt either. I just made do with what I already had. I DID purchase the solid red and the backing fabric.

Color selection and placement was a big issue when planning out this design. I needed to make sure that everything looked balanced. For example, I didn't want two animals of similar color directly next to each other (like the purple cat and the purple fish). I also had to take into account which direction each animal is facing....like the horse, the cat, and the bear, for example. I didn't want to have a whole bunch of them facing the same way right next to each other.

Close-up of the duck and the sheep!

Pig, Ladybug, Fish, and Bunny!

Bear, Cat, Butterfly, and Horse!

Here is a gecko-type thing. The quilting design in the blue and green areas was my own design. I just traced four hearts (one in each corner of the large squares) and connected them with a straight line to make a continuous quilting line.

This style of border is called "piano keys" for obvious reasons. I love this border, and I think it came out exactly how I pictured it. I quilted the same looping hearts stencil that I used in my son's quilt on this border here.

I repeated all the fabrics used throughout the quilt in this pieced border.

Close-up of the heart I quilted in each corner block.

It's a little wrinkly because I took it out of Caroline's crib right before photographing it, but here is the quilting you can see from the back side.