OK, in truth, I finished this one last Friday.  But you have to spread these things out.   This one is for this week’s installment of Finished for Friday, hosted by Lit and Laundry!

This quilt is for my sweet little niece, Olive. My very first niece, as a matter of fact!  Anyways, I think all babies should have something homemade.  Especially the babies in your own family.

It’s an incredibly simple pattern, but I love how clean and neat it looks.  Everything lined up and straight.  Organized.  Purposeful.  I have found I really don’t prefer the quilts that claim to be “scrappy” or random.  The ones where the instruction says something like “put the pieces together in a way that looks good.”  It drives me nuts.  I can spend forever looking at it, thinking there’s too much pink over on this side, or too much yellow over there.  It just isn’t enjoyable to me.  I prefer instructions that say to put A next to B next to C.  I have fun picking the fabrics and all of that, but I really want the pattern to just tell me what to do.

The other thing that this made me remember: I love sewing the binding onto quilts. For those non-sewers, that’s the very small outermost border (yellow, in the case of this quilt).  It’s the very last step, and the only bit (in my world) that is in any way done by hand.  Hand-sewing the whole thing would take me forever and I’d lose interest. I’m a machine quilter, all the way. But that last bit of the binding has to be done by hand.  And while it can be tedious, I love the way it really finishes the whole thing.  Both in the sense of being “done,” and also in the sense of pulling it together and making it look complete.  The small, even stitches, the smooth enclosure of the outer raw edges of the fabric, the neat corners.  It’s really satisfying in a total OCD kind of way.

Lest you think I’m a fussy neatnik, though, I also love the way the quilt looks after you send it through the washer and dryer.  Immediately after quilting, it can still look very smooth and neat and almost too nice to use.  But once it’s done and you wash and dry it, it takes on that slightly more wrinkly, textured, friendly look.  And that’s what makes it feel more like a cozy blanket you’d use, instead of something fancy you’d fold neatly on a shelf.

Anyways, this one is Olive’s Christmas present, and I hope all six months of her likes it and keeps it for years to come.