Project #3: I spy snowball quilt

I saw the idea for this quilt on Craftster. The person with the screen name ZumaGirl74 designed her quilt this way as sort of an accident. She didn't have enough fancy fabrics to do the traditional snowball pattern. I liked it so much that I kept the idea in my head for 3 years. When my nephew was born I thought it was the perfect excuse to test it out.

This was the first "real" quilt that I've made. I've made a denim rag quilt, but that didn't have any batting. I also made Blockette a cheater stain glass window quilt, but that didn't have batting either. The closest thing to anything quilted was place mats. Let me tell you, quilting a large baby quilt is quite different from a place mat. There is a lot more fabric to mess around with, and mess up. Especially if you are machine quilting the darn thing.

I was pretty pleased with myself that I only managed to get 2 or 3 little folds in the fabric from the quilting process. When I made the place mats I had at least that many on one tiny place mat. The seam ripper was definitely my friend. I left the little sewn in folds on this quilt though. The fabric is dark enough that they are not noticeable. I also used a thick batting which also did a good job of hiding the mistakes. I won't use batting that thick again, even if it was good mistake camouflage. The thickness from the batting was just too much of a pain to manipulate under the arm of my sewing machine. Thin batting is what I'll use from now on.

My nephew's quilt is actually quite large for a baby quilt. It measures a whopping 42 x 52 inches! I'm hoping his parents will use it as a floor blanket when he gets big enough for tummy time.

I chose bright, high contrast colors because they are supposed to be what a baby can see the easiest. I'm not normally into the color yellow, so it's weird that this quilt turned out to have a ton of yellow in it.

There was some debate between me and Mrblocko as to whether or not the yellow border fabric was too girly. The shirts on the fabric have hearts on them. I was not given the memo that hearts are girly. I thought hearts were for love. Again, I didn't get the memo that love was girly as well. I liked that there were hearts on the fabric, and since I was the one making the quilt, the border fabric stayed. Although you can't tell from the photo, the border fabric matches the rest of the quilt perfectly.

My camera did not like the black background fabric in this quilt. Thusly, the photos of this quilt are especially pooptastic. When I tried to take a picture without the flash, the camera wouldn't focus. Something about the tiny black dots on the fabric made the camera go all wonky. So my choices of pictures were either blurry or washed out. Washed out it is!

Front:
Back: (The white circle is the label. I named the quilt "I spy a snowball fight."
I think maybe I should refrain from naming objects after weather events. As soon as this quilt was finished we got smacked with a ton of snow!