I make a lot of quilts as gifts for friends and family, or quilts-just-cause-I-wanna, but I do not take a lot of commissioned orders. For one thing, I find that if I do it too frequently, it stops being fun. And for another, as all quilters know, it’s not as though there’s much of a profit margin on quilt-making.  Fabric is expensive, and the quilt takes a lot of time. Precisely how much are people willing to pay for a baby blanket, you know?

But, sometimes the timing and the desire and all of that come together and I am more than happy to take a new order. Such was the case with this quilt. I made it for an old friend from middle school, whom I haven’t seen in 20 (!!) years but keep up with a bit online (thanks, Facebook!). A very close friend of hers (and someone else I know from our school days) recently had a baby girl, Olivia, and so came the impetus for this quilt.

The only big request from my friend was to include birds in the quilt. Birds are meaningful for her, so it would be neat that a quilt from her would have that motif on it. We found Joel Dewberry’s Aviary 2, and the rest of the fabric stack came together quickly from there. My goodness, that is a gorgeous line. I think Joel Dewberry is right up near the top of my list of favorite fabric designers. Anyways, I am SO SO happy with how this group of fabrics came together from the bits of Aviary 2 that I bought and my stash. I think it manages to be feminine without a ton of pink, bright and bold without hurting my eyeballs.

Making a quilt with equilateral triangles has been on my list for a while, now, and with a 60-degree triangle ruler, it was easy to cut and piece. These were all cut from 5.5″ strips of fabric, so the finished height of each triangle is 5″. I shuffled up the fabrics and randomly chain-pieced all ten rows at once, only trying to keep identical fabrics from being right next to each other. With random layouts, I find you can really over-think it and make yourself nuts, so I try to leave as much of it to chance as I can. (If only all of the points in the quilt came together as nicely as that little set in the picture did. Alas, I’m human, and I only take close-ups of the prettiest parts…)

I’m really happy with the quilting. As with this week’s mug rug, it was directly inspired from Angela Walters’ book – big layered flowers that remind me of peonies.  While it makes for reasonably dense quilting coverage, the size of the design meant that it all worked up pretty quickly. And though it’s hard to see in photographs, it gives the quilt a really cool texture after a run through the dryer.

The bright pink dots on the binding (who doesn’t love a polka-dot binding?) are from Jennifer Paganelli’s Queen Street line, which I think might be out of print. Too bad, those Siobhan dots are awesome.

The quilt measures about 40×50″, my very favorite size for a baby quilt. Big enough to be useful, but small enough to be portable. Approved by 100% of the 18-month-olds in my house.