Zyggy's baby quilt

I've had this finished for a while, luckily as the baby boy recipient in question (baby Zyggy) is already 5 months old! Zyggy's mum, one of my oldest and dearest friends, thinks it is my best quilt EVER and it's currently her most favourite thing in her house (and she has a lot of nice things).

I'm not sure about that, but I do love it, and it's certainly a nice thing to hear!

I used Cluck Cluck Sew's Bizzy Kid pattern and it's a winner. A really excellent pattern for a baby boy. I found the two Suzanne Ultman, Critter Community fabrics (the birds and the forest) first and then built the rest of the fabrics from there, managed to use up a few stash fabrics....but lets be honest, not many!!! But now I've added to the stash with my leftovers, right!? so it's all good. I used some natural linen as well, gives the eyes somewhere to rest, and a bit more practical for a baby than white I think.

The backing is a quilt set from Ikea with graduating blue dots, the blues work well with the colours in the quilt top and give the quilt a bit of depth. The binding is a simple navy stripe.

But for me the biggest achievement on this quilt is the quilting. Yes, my first ever attempt at free motion machine quilting using the stitch length regulator on my new Bernina 550QE! I did an all over loose stipple design, I can't say it was easy and it did require a fair bit of muscle to manoeuvre the quilt. But the machine made it a whole lot easier than it would've otherwise been and I'm pretty pleased with the results for a first go. If you look closely (don't) you can see a few bumps but overall, its fine. Probably what I wouldn't do again is use a navy thread on the back with white on the front, the navy has come through to the front in a few places, but it's not terrible.

Another close friend has just had a baby boy, so the planned quilt for my mum for Christmas is on the backburner (Mother's Day maybe?) and I need to get started on a new boy quilt. Looking for inspiration....