Blue & Brown Stacked Coins

I finished a commissioned quilt for a friend of mine a day or two ago.  She wanted a gift for a new baby boy, preferably in shades of Tiffany blue and brown, and she liked the stacked coins design.  Here’s what I came up with:

The solid is about the closest I could find to Tiffany blue. I believe it’s Kona Cotton in Cornflower but of course I never remember to write these things down.  The solids were a bunch of fat quarters I found from various sources, including several prints from the Kaufman Monaluna line.

The backing is a fabric my friend and I fell in love with, Zoology by Michael Miller. How fun is that? The background is a very dark brown, though from a distance it can look black.

I made a little label and embroidered the new baby’s initials and birth date.  The label border and the binding are from Connecting Threads, their Riviera line.  I thought the fabric quality was nice and the price is great!

And I really love the organic straight lines for the quilting (inspiration here). Enough that I may have taken back some of the nasty things I’ve been saying about my walking foot. Not only does it look neat and modern, but the way it crinkled up in the wash made it seem extra cushiony. It measured about 36×30 before washing, not entirely sure how much it shrunk.

Speaking of the wash, there were some minor heart attacks involved when I ran it through the washer & dryer.  You see, for the first time since I jumped on the no-pre-washing bandwagon, I neglected to throw in a color catcher.  And lo and behold, the damn thing bled. I am tempted to blame some of the, ahem, bargain fabrics I got at Joann’s, but of course I have no evidence. Just faint brown spots that nearly made me cry in frustration.  I scrubbed it with Oxi-Clean and sent it through the wash a second time, and they’re still there.  Thankfully, my husband tells me I’m crazy.  Even knowing what the problem was, he says he looked closely at the quilt and could barely find the spots.  So it’s not a complete tragedy, but you know I was freaking out pretty badly.

So, there you have it. Another finish, hooray!

And just wait until I get back from visiting my in-laws for Rosh Hashanah this coming weekend.  I’ll have another finish to show off, and many of the fabrics will look awfully familiar…