Pretty as Can Bee Baby Clothes Quilt

I just love how this project came out!  The colors in this set of baby clothes were a sunny yellow and pink, just so pretty - and there were bees on several of the outfits, so that just had to be the theme.  I wanted to do something different, but when it came time to actually start the cutting and sewing, I made a last minute judgement call and decided to go with the Honeybee block.  In order to make the best use of the baby outfits I decided to make the blocks over-sized at 15 inches so that the centers could be 9 inches square.  This allowed me to use up almost every last bit of those cute little outfits.

I decided to alternate the blocks with slightly different coloring to give the quilt a little more interest.  The pink fabric with big white polka dots was the perfect choice for sashing and border, plus I was able to use the last few scraps of baby clothes for the cornerstones!  The hardest part was cutting out the 144 teardrop shapes for the bees in the corners of the blocks - that was quite a task in itself.

 After putting the top together I decided to start out with just some stitch in the ditch quilting around the blocks to see how much more quilting I needed to do.  I really liked the soft feel of the quilt at that point, so finished it off by quilting the teardrops down (they are raw edge, so will fray a tiny bit after a few washes, but will stay put because of the quilting).  I love the white and yellow dot I found for the back - it looks a bit like a honeycomb!

I intended to add just loop the loops around the edges, but found this awesome tutorial to quilt a Honeybee  on The Inbox Jaunt - if you like free motion quilting, you have to check this blog!  Seriously, fun and easy to do because she shows the step by step process.  She also has a great set of doodle tutorials that I fully intend to work through someday.  So I ended up with bees and loops and added her name as well.

Now it's time to pack these beauties up and send them to their home.  

I've got more projects ready to be started!  It's just as much fun to start a new project as it is to finish one, I think!