Quilt 120: Baby Australian Animals - DONE!

There was a sale at Patchwork With Gail B - and they had an adorable quilt kit marked down.  I couldn't resist.  Here's the top, after piecing.  There's a center planel with baby Australian animals shown, and the borders are an adorable coordinating print.  In the corners, the original design calls for some of the coordinating print to be cut out and applique'd - but I felt that was too busy.  Instead I decided to insert a fancy-stitch design of my own.

 I had a length of bright green that I wanted to use for the backing.  It's not an exact match to the greens on the top, however.

 But binding the quilt with this pink swirly leftover fabric would create enough separation between the back and front- and the pink goes great with both!

 I mentioned wanting to do a fancy design in the corners with stitching (instead of applique).  I found this image online - a cluster of gum leaves.  I used the Art-n-Stitch software that came with the Q-Matic to trace the leaves and make a stitching pattern I could execute on the longarm.

And here's my test of the design using scraps.  It turned out great!

The animals in the center panel are really cute.  I didn't want to do end-to-end quilting on this quilt, but opted instead to outline the animals and add a little bit of interest to the backgrounds inside the frames.

 And here you see on the finished quilt how that turned out!

The finished quilt!  Doubleclick the image below for a larger picture.  In this photo you can see the gumleaves in the corners (especially lower left)

44" x 52" - quilted on the longarm (freemotion, ruler work, Q-Matic gum leaves) cotton batting

My friend Sarah just became a grandmother for the first time recently.  She saw this quilt and fell in love with it - so it's going to be her gift to her granddaughter.