Summer Baby Blanket

So here's the project that's been occupying my few spare crafty hours lately. The sewing itself did not take that much time but the chances that I had to work on it were few and far between.

I'd been wanting to make a bigger patchwork piece, so when I heard my best-friend-from-childhood was having a baby this summer I knew this baby would be the motivation I needed to tackle a larger project.

I based the design off the Stacked Coins crib quilt in Joelle Hoverson's Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts book. I wanted to play with the organic/random versus the logical/planned, so I cut all the colorful strips free hand and forced myself to sew them together in a random order. Basically I threw all the strips on a pile and picked the next strip to add in random order (I did put back strips that repeated the same color/pattern, so I guess I wasn't totally random). Then I carefully sliced the stripy strips into 4 1/2 inch columns and pieced them together with the yellow border.

I was originally planning to do the border fabric in white but that didn't seem practical for a baby blanket plus I didn't want all the other bright colors to show through the white. I'm not entirely happy with the yellow....but, at least it's not pink and it is a cheery summer blanket for a summer baby. May sunshine follow her wherever she goes!

P.S. You wanna know the silly little thing that makes me ridiculously happy on this quilt? The puppy dog print from Heather Ross.