A new little girl was recently born into our family. My nephew and his wife have been the subject of a few of my blog posts. You may remember them as the ones who brought me back African fabric from their time in the Gambia with the Peace Corps (click here for a post about those fabrics, and click here for one with Kevin, Alex and the wedding quilt I made them that was inspired by, and backed with, those fabrics).
Roan Mary Walters is a joy! And she needed a quilt 😄. Last summer my Open Lab group met a number of times in each other’s yards, and on one of those days we brought in items to share. I picked up an unfinished top with fabric inspired by the book The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle.
For some reason I just knew it would be the perfect quilt for Roan, so I layered it with bright green fleece and straight line quilted it on my HQ Sweet 16 with my channel ruler.
Then I free-motion quilted 5 of the red squares with my own webs just for fun.
I quilted “Made with love for Roan Mary by Aunt Chris” along with the words to “Jesus Loves Me” in the borders.
And in no time it was done. I showed it to Mike and he was a little surprised that I would make a quilt with spiders on it for a little girl. That thought hadn’t crossed my mind (this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned that we don’t always think alike 🤪). I chose to move forward anyways and wrapped it up with a copy of the book. We gave it to Roan when we saw everyone on Mother’s Day. Not only did Kevin and Alex love it, but Kevin’s brother Adam said he wanted one for himself (my nephew Adam is a grown man who did a tour of duty in Iraq! I guess I’m going to have to do some searching for more VB spider fabric online).
Here’s Roan with her new quilt and her grandma Mary Sue.
If you’ve heard any of my lectures you may remember me mentioning my dear sister-in-law who talked me into taking a quilting class back in 1987, never finished her first quilt, and contributed greatly to my addiction!!! This is her! And I’ll be indebted to her forever 😊.
nancy pedersoj says
I never thought of a quilt like that for a baby. Good idea tho.
Dawn Ellen Weideman says
Chris, did you also put the traditional label on the back with your name, your city, and date?
Thanks!
clkquilt says
Hi Dawn,
Good question. No, this time I didn’t because I had signed my name and date in the quilting, along with Roan’s name.
Jan says
What a sweet idea!!
Lovely!
Laurelie Neubauer says
One of the nursery rhymes I always sang for my kids was the “ Itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout,…down …” So spiders are darling. When my niece, who had a miscarriage of twin girls, finally had a little girl in Aug. of 2019 she named her Evangeline. I knew I had to make her a quilt. Mine was inspired by the days of the week appliqués I found at a quilt shop in Lodi, Wis. Then I was inspired by the black & red dotted fabric that complimented the cream colored squares. So the quilt was cream, black & red. I was asked by my sister why black for a baby quilt & I replied that a babies vision responds first to black, white & red when they are first born & I made the quilt to be a wall hanging too so they could read the days of the week to her on the wall. Then it was ok. I will send the picture of how it turned out if You want to post. I loved that quilt just looking at it.