Paisley’s quilt

This sweet little quilt is for a cousin’s new baby girl named Paisley.

And yes, I had to include a paisley fabric in the design.  It was unavoidable. =)

The quilt is based on a traditional honey bee block, which is the large square surrounded by the pink petals on each corner.  I’ve seen honey bee blocks with a 9-patch in the center, but I liked the simplicity of the solid square.  Usually, the honey bee quilts I’ve seen have sashing between the blocks but I really liked the interplay of the blocks set right next to each other.

I thought about stopping with just the main part of the quilt, but in this case, I’m glad I kept going and added the tiny inner border of the paisley print and the outer boarder with more (small) squares.  It really changed the look of the quilt!

I decided to do an allover quilting design, the same one I used on this quilt.  Since this quilt was smallish, I quilted it on my domestic sewing machine.

I pieced the binding with different grey fabrics.  I was planning to use pink but when I actually tried it, there was no comparison.  The binding really ended up echoing the thin inner border and gave it a nice finished look.

To make the honey bee blocks, I pieced a white border around the gray square, mitering the corners.  Then I used the fusible applique method to attach the petals, a tight zig zag stitch finished the applique edges.  It’d been awhile since I’d used applique in a quilt.

Here’s the back.

I’ll take a minute to explain how I’ve been labeling my quilts lately.  I’d previously not taken time to label any of my quilts.  I know… that’s a no no.  But here’s an easy way to do it – it’s so easy that even I am doing it now.  And, I don’t have to worry about it until the binding is going on the quilt.  Then I find a scrap piece of square fabric.  If it’s not square, I cut it square and it really doesn’t matter the exact size.  I first crease the fabric in half diagonally to get a triangle shape, raw edges aligned.  Pressing the shape helps to mark the crease visually (so I can see the space I have for writing/drawing).  Then I open the square and iron it to a piece of freezer paper.  The fabric slightly adheres to the freezer paper enough to give you a stabilized writing surface.  Then I write on only the side of the square that will show (like above).  I use a Pigma permanent fabric marker and when I’m done writing, I iron over it to heat-set it.  Then remove the freezer paper and form the triangle back into shape and align the raw edges to the raw edges of a quilt corner.  Pin the label into place so that when you sew on the binding with a 1/4” seam, you will catch the label and the binding.  The last step in attaching the label is to take a needle and thread and blind stitch across the top of the label onto the quilt back.