Just a few days shy of his 20-month birthday, I finally finished B's nursery quilt, aka the Marine Quilt!
The fabric is mostly from Dan Stiles's Marine collection. It's hard to find now, but I stocked up on it when I was making everything else for B's nursery two years ago (you can see more of the nursery here and here). It seems Stiles is coming out with a follow-up collection in the next few months. It looks like it will include reprints of some of the original prints, along with some new characters (crabs! pirate ships! turtles!). I paired the Marine prints with two Painters Canvas semi-solids from Laura Gunn (in navy and orange).
The binding was the result of lots of debate. Ideally, I wanted to use a coordinating solid or light blue dot, but I ran out of the Painters Canvas solids, and I knew I was going to have trouble matching another solid to the myriad colors I'd already used in the quilt.
After asking the opinions of Matt and our nanny, I finally decided to use some Lizzy House Pearl Bracelets in tin man. I was definitely on the fence about the gray, but I think it really worked out well. I like that it doesn't stick out too much, but it still provides a nice border to all of the busyness. And the white pearls help to break up the gray. I also snuck in one little strip of the star print, which I love so much.
I made the "front" first as a simple strip quilt. I love these prints so much, and they're so big and bold that I thought the generously sized strips were the best way to show them off.
When it came to the back, I decided to do something a little different. I started off making the small square-in-square blocks but thought using them for the entire back would be too much. So I combined them with a few more strips and some larger rectangle-in-rectangle blocks, which really worked well to showcase the whale prints. I love how all the improv came together in the end, and the "back" is really more the "front" now.
For the quilting, I was originally going to do zig-zags across the entire quilt, but in the end, I decided to switch it up and use a few different patterns. I started with a zig-zag in the middle, then the adjacent strips got some very dense straight-line quilting. The next sections were more zig-zags, and then I alternated between zig-zags and less dense straight-line quilting. I used white thread throughout.
Some of my favorite blocks:
I love how the boxes frame the cute little whales on the back.
B decided to get it on the photo shoot action. I guess it's a good sign that he likes the quilt so much!
For now, the quilt's residing on the back of B's rocker (it's a bit warm for summer), but I'm so happy with how it turned out, and I hope B loves snuggling with it for years.
And just for fun, the photo shoot blooper reel:
