Last November, a dear friend told me she was pregnant. She’d waited until pretty late to tell people and I was so thrilled for her! And then I started panicking that I wouldn’t be able to get a quilt done for the new baby. So, everything went on hold for a bit while I rushed to finish this Mouse and Stars Baby Quilt.
My friend and her husband own some pretty cute rats and I thought it’d be appropriate do a mouse/rat theme. I had a hard time finding inspiration because a search for mouse themed quilts mostly turned up Mickey Mouse quilts. Thank goodness for Pinterest! I went down the rabbit hole of related pins on Pinterest, and stumbled across an adorable mouse applique from Embroidery Library that I decided to base the quilt around.
I used the Sweet Dreams Baby Quilt pattern and altered it to adjust for the mouse applique being a smaller center block. I also changed the star applique shape and made them out of fleece to give the quilt some different textures.
I didn’t have time to send the quilt out for quilting, so I tried my hand at doing an orange peel design using my walking foot. It was… not as nice as I would have liked. =D Honestly, I was pretty frustrated with it, and pretty depressed at how lousy it looked.
After a lot of agonizing over it, and trying to figure out how to fix it (and repeatedly telling myself that picking out all the quilting was crazy town talk… especially on such a tight deadline), I decided I could probably fix most of the problems by redoing the quilting on the the dark blue blocks.
I used an alternating pattern of big and small stars to go over the previous quilting lines. It took a while, but I was much much happier with how it looked after. I had to learn how to bury threads in a quilt and boy was I good at it by the end…
For the backing, I used the super cute Mouse Camp fabric. I’ve been eye-ing this fabric for a while but never had a reason to buy it. It seemed like the perfect choice for this quilt!
Some more photos.
I was worried I wouldn’t get this done and shipped out in time, but baby decided to take her time, so it was all good. I hope she enjoys her first quilt!