Modern Baby Quilt

Here's a fun, bold, happy project! A modern baby quilt is just the thing to make at the beginning of Spring.

This is my latest project over at QUILTsocial.

The first post gives the fabric requirements and cutting instructions:

This modern baby quilt steals the show

This project I challenged myself to use solid fabrics and let the stitches add the texure. Of course it was not that difficult to achieve using all of the stitch features of the PFAFF performance icon! I used my old favourite, floating stitches, as I put the blocks together.

Floating stitches on a modern baby quilt make all the difference

If you've been a reader for any length of time you know that I love the churn dash block. This quilt was inspired and is made with the units of the traditional block. I just played with placement of the units to end up with hints of churn dashes throughout. See those floating stitches?

HSTs and piecing a baby quilt top with the performance icon

The quilt top was designed so that I could use the radiant stitch feature on the performance icon. This was a new stitch feature for me and I was curious about how to make it work on a quilt. I didn't want to make a crazy patch quilt - which I think would be an excellent place to use these stitches - but I did want space to show off the stitches.

The modern setting is supposed to look like mountain sides. I was thinking about the song from The Sound of Music - Climb every Mountain - and I used the stitches to help me create a landscape. Trees, weeds, flowers, mixed with snow, rain, and sunshine. Even some lucky clover!

Radiant stitches on the performance icon add joy to a baby quilt

I also used a serpentine stippling stitch in some of the connecting hsts when I quilted the top to represent rivers and mountain streams. I know, it sounds silly, but making all of these different elements connect to a theme made it easier to choose what stitches to use, and which not to use on this project. 

In the end I also decided to use the leftover blue and green fabric in the binding and tested it to get most of it to line up with one of the blue, green corners. The rest of the binding is white which feels like a no-no - I guess I could blame it on the modern tendencies of this project!

I like this photo because you can see how I used different thread colors to help me create my imaginary landscape too. It was hard not to put radiant stitches everywhere!

Stippling stitches on the performance icon add whimsy to a baby quilt

Maybe you need a modern baby quilt in your life? Remember, you could always turn it into churn dashes by moving around the units ;)

If you like what you see, 

could you please go to one of the linked posts 

and leave your comment there?

 It will help more quilters find my project. 

Or pin a photo to one of your Pinterest boards :)

Thanks!

With Joy,

Sarah V.