The Wright Side of a Penny: Project: Baby Girl Quilt/Whale Quilt

I am so blessed to know some friends who are having babies. This is for a dear friend who, like me, has suffered from hyperemesis during this pregnancy. This is something that can be very rough from the beginning to the end of the pregnancy. She was expecting a little girl (as you can deduct from the title of this post) and she already has a little boy. She has told her little boy (almost 4) about how there is water around the baby and so now he has it in his head that there must be a whale with his sister somehow. We did some looking around on pinterest together and found this one that looks adorable:

As I read the description of this quilt, she mentions that she uses felt as the whale (which I assume she uses interfacing webbing to fuse it on). So then, I had to find a whale stencil (which is surprisingly simple on pinterest). I decided that I'd be using 6" finished blocks and 4 whales in the middle. My friend wanted pink, purple, grey, brown, and black (as well as the white with the whale in it) for color blocks. I found some beautiful rich colors that would go really well. Here is the final color pallet we came up with:

The backing is a whale flannel that I found (which I think is TOTALLY adorable). The colors are beautiful and rich. I was able to cut my 6.5" squares from each of the colors (I needed 10 from the plain white to have the whale). I got 6 from each fat quarter and then I used 10 from the gray and white wave fabric (I bought 1/2 a yard). Here are the colors all cut out:

Now, with the squares being cut to 6.5", that means finished they'll be 6" squares (with the quilt ending up around 36"x42" before the backing and such). Here's what my sad sketch looks like so you get an idea:

It's not a great sketch but what can you do? Now, after I got all the 6.5" squares cut, I decided to lay the blocks out to see where I should put the colors. Now, I can't take all the credit on this part. My lovely Penny helped me. Here's what we came up with:

(This is pre-whale application). I think we did a great job. My husband's comment was "that's small" and then I reminded him this was a BABY quilt (he's just used to seeing big quilts from me). So, then I needed to get the felt whales on before piecing this quilt together. *A tip with felt from my mom: They now make felt out of recycled bottles SO when you're using fusible paper PUT A PIECE OF CLOTH IN BETWEEN the felt and the iron or it will MELT.* Thank goodness for moms, right? So, I had a 9"x 11" piece of gray felt that I ironed fusible paper to and then used my whale stencil (I printed out an image from the internet and sized it knowing my square would be a finished 6"). Here's how it looked:

I think they ended up pretty cool. I then eyeballed them onto the white squares (if you're more of a perfectionist than I am, use a ruler). I fused them onto the blocks and then started my chain piecing. Then I ironed the seams from each row in one direction and then the next row the opposite direction so that when I sewed the rows together they would mesh nicely. Once the rows were all together, I ironed the final seams in the same direction. Here's how it looked:

I really like it! I then put the batting and backing stacked with the quilt top on top.

The hardest part was deciding how to quilt this bad boy. I knew I wanted to hand stitch around the whales but I didn't know how to do the rest of the squares. After MUCH deliberation (and some time constraints), I (with the help of my mom and husband) went with sail boats around some of the edging.

They went pretty fast to sew. There are a total of 8 boats around the border. I didn't put boats on the brown paisley fabric. I used a light gray thread. After the boats were quilted, I hand quilted around the whales:

I chose this aqua thread that kind of looks like the blue whale on the back. Once the hand quilting was done, my AMAZING mother bound the quilt for me (as vacation with kids is a little harder to get things done like regular life). She did a stitch that looks like waves. It was pretty cool. So, here's what it looked like once it was all washed and ready to be given away: