Baby Giraffes Baby Blanket

I had lots of giraffe prints, and made one up into a quick baby quilt!

As I pulled fabrics to match the colors in the print, I worried that the finished product would be too orange.  See here for another quilt that ended up too orange.  I was trying to avoid that this time around.

Animal prints can be tricky. If you don’t cut the fabric just right, some poor animal will lose his head.  To avoid this as much as possible, I started with really large cuts of fabric, 8 ½ by 16 ½.  I had four pieces, so I knew I wanted to make two copies of two different blocks, but wanted to keep it as simple as possible.  The last quilt I made took two months; I wanted this one to be quick.

I started with 1 ½ inch strips, and surrounded two of the blocks, two times each.

The other two blocks, I surrounded with 2½ inch squares, in a variety of colors and prints.

This is where I chose to be careful with the amount of orange I used.  I didn’t avoid it altogether, but used it sparingly.  It didn’t feel like enough at this point, but once the whole quilt was together, it was perfect!

Each block was now surrounded by some color, but not quite big enough to be a completed quilt.

So, I exactly reversed the first step for the next round.

The block surrounded by skinny strips got a round of 2½ inch squares.

The block surrounded by 2½ inch squares got two rounds of skinny strips.

Four blocks, two patterns.  A quick baby quilt.

The finished quilt is 36 inches by 54 inches.  Instead of quilting in the ditch (hidden among the seams) I quilted ¼ inch from each seam, to add a little dimension to the finished quilt, and to make sure all those little pieces were tacked down in at least two places.

Now, to wait for the next baby shower invitation…