A quilt for Levi

“Cousin Sarah” as she’s known on this blog had a baby.  A while ago.  Her second little boy is named Levi and he’s as precious as could be.  Not that I’ve ever met him in real life… but I feel like you get to know kids by looking at their photos and videos on Facebook.  I’m therefore a reliable source when I say he’s precious.  And, by the way, Cousin Sarah isn’t just a clever name, it’s her honest-to-goodness relationship to us.  Josh’s mom and Sarah’s mom (Aunt Kathy) are sisters.  That means I get to be her cousin, too, which makes me quite happy.

Sometimes I don’t have a clear plan in mind as I set out to make someone a quilt.  In this case, I knew I was going to start a baby quilt and I knew what blocks/pattern I wanted to use {a traditional quilt block called Birds in the Air} and that was about it.  Nonetheless, I jumped in and started making it.  I cut out lots of fabrics that I’d already owned and started piecing the blocks together.  For whatever reason, I just started feeling like this should be a quilt for Levi, but I wasn’t sure.  I’m a weirdo and I can’t fully explain my intuition about these things.

Do you know how I knew FOR SURE that the quilt I’d been working on was indeed meant for Levi? 

I had completed the whole quilt top and was in search of a backing fabric for it. The most important criteria for this search was to find a piece of fabric that was big enough to fully fit on the back of the quilt.  I have tons of small cuts of fabric, but it’s more rare to find one big piece of fabric that’s the right size.  Sure, I don’t often find the perfect back in my fabric stash, so I’ll normally seam 2 or 3 or 14 fabrics together until I’ll have a big enough back to cover whatever quilt I’m working on.  So I searched and searched through lots of colors until I found the perfect back:

Do you see the narrow inch of blue fabric that surrounds the quilt top above?

That was the perfect size for this quilt AND it matched the front!  BINGO!  And then I realized that it was leftover fabric that I bought for when I made Sarah and her husband Jeff their wedding quilt!  How perfect is that?  I told you, sometimes you just know.  You know?

Speaking of which, here is their wedding quilt that I made back in 2006, in my early days of quilting:

I took a day class at my local quilt shop on how to make this pattern called Fractured Crystals by Linda Ballard.  Anyway, the light blue in the center of this quilt, in the corners of the blocks and in one of the borders was the same fabric that I got to use in the backing fabric of Levi’s quilt.

Now, back from the trip down memory lane and onto Levi’s finished quilt:

I did a swirly quilting design on this one.

Here’s a close-up of the label, which I’ve been much better at taking the time to make lately.

I had to ask for Josh’s help in outlining the state of Iowa.  Sarah and Jeff are from Michigan, are now are in Virginia via the Bahamas, BUT she was a frequent Iowa visitor while growing up and visiting grandparents, aunts & uncles, and cousins here.  I wanted to incorporate that Iowa luv into the label.

Every quilt has a story and that was the story of Levi’s quilt.

{Ali & Tara, do you recognize the circles fabrics that make up the big triangles?  Those were my color inspiration for this quilt!}