Birth of a new quilt

The extended side of my family consists of my Granny, three aunts and six cousins and when you are all as loud as we are that is one large family gathering! (As G will tell you because he is quiet and can't handle the family "braying"!) However, at some point next week it is going to be one member bigger when the first one of my generation gives birth to the next. My cousin is due to any moment from Wednesday give birth to a little baby boy and all of us are tremendously excited.

And of course as a crafter what do you give but handmade goods and this is the first part of that little parcel that will most likely be winging it's way off next week. Please excuse the multitude of pictures that I am about to post! I couldn't pick just one or two!

This is the fabric that started it all off. The new baby is apparently having an elephant themed room and when I found this fabric on etsy I couldn't resist it spoke to me and we all know that that is something not to be ignored! Although Japanese linen is seriously not a cheap item! But what a delight to cut and sew with and how cute are the little tiny elephants!

I picked up some other fabrics here in there in blue, because obviously he is a boy and I tried really hard not to make it too pretty because G says that boys don't appreciate that sort of thing! So it is mainly dots, vines, leaves and a cloudy grey/blue fabric.

I wanted to keep it simple so I went with squares in a diagonal pattern as I really wanted the elephant/hippo fabric to be the main attraction of the quilt rather than the pattern that I used. And to be perfectly honest after the ongoing saga that is my large quilt I really needed something simple to convince myself that yes I could actually complete a project! (I hate taking pictures of the full size of them though, I didn't seem to be able to find a good way of doing it so I've just pinned it to the clothes line here.)

The back I am still a little bit on the fence about, I love the two fabrics that I've used but I'm not too sure if the bottom one is a little bit too girly. Lets face it though it is really too late to be worrying about that detail now! That was one of the reasons for carrying the navy leafy pattern on to the back in this way though, to try and balance out the delicate with something a little more masculine and I also like the idea of it have a turn down at the top.

You can see the back a little better in this one. I'm also think of maybe embroidering his name, when he gets one and the date on the back but I shall see how I feel to facing up to the challenges of tiny embroidery stitches when I find out how long his name might be!

And indulge me in just a few more please! Look at those corners! The bane of my life this binding and cornering was! I sewed the binding on the wrong way twice! Then I couldn't get the join right! I was convinced that after all that the corners were going to be a complete nightmare, but how wrong I was, they went together like a dream!