Safari Baby Quilt

 A friend of ours and his wife had their first baby a few months ago. He is an avid hunter and was our Safari Club chapter president for a few years. He's also the service manager at the Ford dealership and I laughed when we took our truck in last month for a recall issue and DH and he poured over maps of an area where DH drew a tag for an Orex in January before they even checked in the truck. 

Just that morning, I had thought about hunting down some safari fabric to make a baby quilt for J & T. I went to look at emails and there was one showcasing this new fabric line and it included a 25% off your entire store purchase.

It could not be more perfect and the timing was serendipidous

I usually have a hard time settling on a pattern, but this time it was clear. I chose the Scattered Stars pattern

I scaled the blocks down from the original pattern when I made my Love You S'more x2 quilt and I thought it would be perfect for this project. I think this pattern is a fun way to showcase the fabrics

I backed it with Minky because Minky backed quilt seem to be the ones that are always reached for first. This is the first quilt Jackie or Sandy didn't quilt. We have a very small quilt shop about 55 miles from us and I thought I'd give them a shot. The owner does the longarming and she did a very nice job. She quilted a pattern called Animal Crackers that has safari animals in the design.

It finishes at 45 x 55

I hope this little quilt will be loved and dragged on many adventures!

Time to Sew

I actually found time to sew on Friday, but with the rain last week, the mustard weed was threatening to take over the yard so I pulled out the mower for the first time this year:

As much as I fuss about mowing, this old mower has been incredibly reliable. It's 10 years old and after sitting in the shed all winter, it started up with the very first pull of the rope. Mowing before sewing. *grin* Skeet has really been enjoying the spring weather too:

Since the rain put him out of his feeding gig, he's been finding alternative entertainment.

Once I tamed the yard, I worked on some sewing projects. I caught up with the Two-Step mystery Quilt clues from My Carolina Home. This is the March clue - still need to trim these:

And this is April's clue:

And I made 12 of these little flower blocks:

I just Googled 'free flower block' and picked one I liked. This one starts out with 4 - 3 1/2" squares and you snowball each corner with 1 1/2" squares. This was the inspiration fabric:

It's been in my stash forever and I haven't a clue what I had in mind when I bought it, but it needs to be used. Thus, I thought the flower blocks might fit and make a cute baby quilt:

Then I fell upon this little fat quarter pack in my stash that included this cute piece:

I didn't particularly care to work with the other fat quarters and I thought this little chunk needed to be a baby quilt. I'm not quite sure how to make a baby quilt using 1 fat quarter that I don't want to cut up, but I started pulling coordinating fabrics from my various bins and am thinking about building some borders, one of which will be patchwork.

It's been a while since I've had this much time in a day to sew. I felt pretty spoiled and a little guilty, but it was nice to have a little stitching time.