Oh, baby baby baby #2 — we are ready now!  Your very own, mama-made quilt awaits you. (It’s not true.  We aren’t ready. We have birth supplies to gather, lasagnas to make, and cupboards to organize.  Not to mention, you have some more cookin’ to do….) But in the your-quilt-is-ready-for-you way, we are ready.  Oh, and not to brag, but I’m just thrilled with how this one turned out and I had so much fun making it.

It all starts with some piles…like these…

…that get honed down and organized and cut up into this…

and then a most beloved Aunt comes for a visit and late into the night she eats all your chocolate-pecan turtles and drinks all the wine you aren’t allowed to have and sits and talks to you.  And while you cut and iron and make crucial color decisions, the two of you dissect all the important topics — death and dying, and parenting, and being easy on ourselves as women and as moms, and how to keep kids off drugs, and good books, and the intricacies of family, until eventually, those piles of fabric becomes this:

and this….

Oh, homemade quilts.  Their very time and cost ineffectiveness is part of what I love most about making them — they can only be a labor of love.  I do believe some things should always remain only a labor a love.  And love indeed — right here in every stitch of these lovely fabrics.  Love in the color hues and love in the mistakes (please don’t study this quilt with a magnifying glass.)  I can’t wait to get a baby on there — preferably mine!

For those of you who are interested in the details, I hunted around on Pinterest for months, searching for the right quilt pattern for this baby — something that said, “I’m numero dos and look what a cool quilt I got.”  (there are some benefits to being 2nd born.)  Finally I found this fun Sparkle Quilt quilt-along and knew it was the one.  Even more fun — I got to decide everything about it — the size, the colors, the number of blocks, and whether or not to include some “negative space” — which you can see in the photo at the top, I did.  Not to mention, I did something I had never tried before — I totally winged it on the backside, starting with one sparkle block and then building around it with scraps I had laying around, just like in the olden days, until it was the right size.  It’s make-shift and haphazard and full of pieces that might not exactly go together, just like parenting.

Front and back and imperfectly aligned, I love it.  Just like I love this growing babe.  Upon receiving the quilt back from my right-hand quilting gal in Colorado, I sewed up the binding and brought her outside last week for a dose of fresh air on the front porch.  I like to think she received a dose of good energy from the spring greenery just starting to show itself, and also, perhaps, a sense of her true purpose — to keep the most important people warm and cozy — with every stitch of her being.  Come to think of it, that might be my true purpose too.

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