Lucky Us Quilt

I was recently at a local quilt shop with my husband and he caught his eye on this quilt.  He has a friend that is having a baby any day now.  His friend LOVES St. Patrick's Day and is named after it, so he thought his friend would love this quilt for his baby.  This quilt was originally designed as a wall hanging. The pattern is by KimberBell Design called "Lucky US Wall Hanging"  I changed it to make it a little larger and it is just bigger than a crib size quilt.  This quilt was a lot of fun to make but I did cram it into just 4 days from start to finish to try and have it done before they had their baby.   It was also my first time doing machine applique.  I always told myself that machine applique was too hard so I never even attempted it.  Little did I know that it is actually easy and it is one of those things you just need to practice.  I think machine applique is actually really fun.  I look forward to using this skill more in the future.  I am also still practicing my machine quilting skills and trying to save some money so I did all the machine quilting on this quilt myself.  It turned out a lot better than I expected since I have only machine quilted a handful of quilts.  Quilts definitely take a lot more to machine quilt than the pot holders and other small projects I have made in the past. 

The clovers and mini 9 patches had a really cool effect on this quilt.  Each block is very different and makes the quilt fun.

A little shot of my machine quilting.  I decided to keep it very simple.  I did loops shown above.  Below I decided to do squiggly lines on the 2 outer boarders.  I did them different directions and different style on each boarder.  It is hard to see in the photo below but I quilted squiggly lines the direction going with the stripes on the piano key boarder and on the outer boarder did them lengthwise.

 The pattern for this quilt had a vase in the top left corner block.  I didn't really like the vase and it is for a baby boy so I changed it to be horse shoes instead.  (Also keeping it more baby friendly leaving out choking hazards) It also had a flower on the hat that I left off as well.

 

 I kept the back very simple as well.

Thank you for sharing in my joy and accomplishments!!