First, let me start off by saying, yes, I do still blog here. I’ve been crazy busy with custom orders, and I’m showing you one of those today.

One of my very best customers asked me to make her a quilt with the same zoo fabric featured in this quilt. She loved that print, but definitely wanted something unique- something that is very her. Well, thank goodness we were able to track down more of that print!

She wanted purple to be the main color, followed by pink, with some pops of other colors here and there. She also wanted a random layout of squares and rectangles.

Well when you put a small scale print into a random layout it can be difficult to make it really pop. The perfect opportunity to try to bring it into focus is in the quilting. I decided I wanted to make this quilt really special, so I hand stitched around every zoo print.

I also added bits of embroidery like these around the quilt.

Next I machine quilted in a diagonal grid on the whole quilt except for the zoo prints. To really bring those out, I went back and quilted squares in each of those prints to draw the eye there.

One of my very favorite parts of this quilt is the label. She really wanted me to label my work, so I wanted to make the label awesome. I machine appliqued some of the animals from the zoo print onto voile and embroidered “Handmade for Karen”. I just love that part!

The backing is a scrumptious velveteen from Anna Maria Horner. It feels absolutely divine. Between the voile/lawn front and the velveteen backing, it will be the perfect quilt year round.

She loved the Dear Stella metallic dot I used to frame the zoo print in my other quilt, so I used that for binding. I just adore white binding! It really makes the quilt pop, and the gold dots are just icing on the cake.

Well this quilt is already en route to its destination. I cannot wait for her to receive it! I just love doing custom work!

I hope you are having a wonderful week!

-Meredith