Poppy Quilt for Poppy

My beautiful friend Sam had a baby girl (about 2 years ago). Sam is this young and trendy beauty and I just wanted to make her a hip "Pinterest worthy" quilt. Well, I should have copied something from Pinterest then, because, I am sorry to say, I think I sort of missed the mark! Haha. I mean, it's okay and everything. But it was not a normal Ivy quilt with all the many colors and randomness, so I found it more difficult to figure out. Ended up with simple squares cuz nothing else was looking good!

I knew she was naming her Poppy so I found some fabric with Poppies on it. There were all sorts of other fabrics that matched the poppies perfectly, but I just can't bring myself to do matchy matchy. So..I wandered the HUGE quilt shop and found a few other fabrics to "go with" the poppies that reminded me of my cute Sam and her fun personality. She is absolutely adorable and makes the most adorable babies.

Red and grey dominate this quilt, with some lighter pink shades and just a small pop of light blue.
I quilted on either side of the seams.

To be honest, this was a hard quilt for me to figure out how piece. Because I'd found all these fabrics in different areas of the quilt shop, none of the were meant to go with each other. Later at home, when I put them together, they didn't actually work like I'd hoped.

Enter Ian.

I was laying out all different patterns getting more and more frustrated. And Ian would walk by me and randomly start moving them around in a better way, explaining color saturation and other technical artistic terms. He helped me see why the grey tones of the bird fabric with the black and white of the bikes were odd. He has a pretty artistic eye and he'd magically arrange them just a bit better.

The bicycle print was originally only black and white. It needed a bit of color to tie in with the other fabrics so I chose just a few girls to color in with sharpies.

The bird fabric was originally in all grey tones and felt too washed out, so I chose just one or two on each square to darken the outline with a black sharpie. It made a big difference tying it in with the b/w bicycles.

I did soak it in vinegar water and washed it before giving it to her, so hopefully the colors set fine. (The little birds already had the "watercolor" which I think is the reason the girls/bikes needed some color.)

With all the tweaking, I think the fabrics worked out well in the end.

Left over fabric led me to make a small doll quilt for her sister, Goldie. (Cute names, eh?)
Now looking back, I wish I'd had more of the large grey/white polka dots for the large quilt...
Oh well.