Bluebird Park Baby Quilt finished!

We've got our first finish of 2014, folks. The Bluebird Park Baby Quilt is finished!

After a bit of panicking early last week, I was actually able to finish it up pretty quickly and in plenty of time for my deadline, the baby shower I helped to host this past Saturday. The quilt was a gift for the little one our lovely friends Buddy and Bridget are expecting next month, and they loved it (success!).

The quilt design is the Cub Crawl Baby Quilt from the Fat Quarterly book Shape Workshop for Quilters. The book is a great collection of individual blocks, along with several projects, including this quilt. I love the simplicity of it, especially for a baby quilt. The pieced back was made of leftover cuts from the front, combined with a few pieces from my stash.

Unfortunately, the weather didn't want to cooperate with me in the days leading up to the shower, and these cloudy-weather pics don't do the colors in the quilt justice. The teal and green solids (both Moda Bella) are both bright and soothing, and the colors throughout the prints are perfect for a baby room (without being dull).

The Bluebird Park collection is such a fun set of cheery, whimsical prints, and the quilt design was a great way to show them off, especially in the boxes surrounded by the solids.

I kept the quilting super simple so as not to distract from the prints, which are really the stars here. I used a teal thread (just a bit darker than the teal solid used in the quilt) and stitched along both sides of the horizontal seams. I bound the quilt with more of the teal solid after deciding a new print would be too chaotic with everything else going on in the quilt. I love the way the teal binding acts as a subtle but perfect frame.

I can't wait to meet the little guy who will hopefully be snuggling up in this one very soon!

P.S. I'm linking up to Kelly's Craft Book Sew-Along over at Live.Love.Create. It always feels good to finish up a project from one of the books on my shelf.