something new, something blue

Guess what? My first Dutch friend is pregnant! I’m so happy for her - - - and happy for me, because I get to make her a baby quilt! Yippee!

My friend has a minimalist style, so I best tred lightly. This quilt shall be no riot of color or high-energy, visually complex pattern. No, we need something simple, something calm.

Luckily, I have just such a quilt in mind. It is a design related to my Transparency block. Ok, so that block didn’t turn out minimalist in my first Pas de Deux quilt, but the design can be quite understated.

Pinky promise!

To begin, I presented my friend with a tall stack of fabrics. I had picked out a bunch that I thought might appeal to her, including all kinds of colors and prints from cute to classic. I asked her to choose just 1-2 favorites, to define my color palette. She chose this black/cream bird print (an original Cotton & Steel), plus the aqua Carolyn Friedlander Ladder Lines print.

The quilt pattern I have in mind is a design I originally sketched many years ago. You can spot it the corner of the above photo. Transparency is the main deign element at work. That’s when two patchwork shapes appear to overlap and create a darker section.

I had imagined that the background of the baby quilt would be a relatively light color and the patchwork squares would be darker, so that the overlap/transparency section could be darker still. However, based on my friend’s fabric choices and the quantity of each I had on hand, that vision needed to change. I’ve settled on this beautiful Freespirit Designer Solid called Serpent for the background fabric. It’s rich, dark hue works well with the Ladder Lines print and won't be quickly stained with use.

I’ve started to cut and lay out the quilt. Choosing a fabric for the overlap section is proving difficult! I could use white, as if the overlapping sections result in a whiter, brighter square. Or, I could use something darker than the cream fabrics, such as the Spotted Ecru print shown in the upper row. Using a darker fabric would be more readable as transparency. Hm.

When you use few fabrics rather than many, each fabric choice is far more weighty. I shall press on and hopefully arrive on the other side with a minimalist, yet charming baby quilt.

Fingers crossed!