Neutral Colors Quilt for Baby M.

While I was in PA recently, we had some bomb-phenom baby showers.  Seriously, such wonderful food, such good times.  It was magnificent.  So many people gave us sweet sweet presents, some of which I'll be sharing with you in time.  With all of these gifts and the overwhelming cuteness, I started to become even more excited for this little bambino to join us come February.  Just looking at the little onesies and the socks (Oh, lawd, the socks!) made me want to have that thing that is supposed to fill these cute clothes :)  You know, the baby!

As you can imagine, with the whole "having a baby whose gender has not been revealed" thing, I got a lot of yellow & green.  And my, it's cute!  The duck faces and the frogs, they're all pretty darling.  At the same time, I have a fear that one day, my then-grown child will look back at pictures of him/herself always dressed in yellow & green and know.  They'll know I didn't find out, and they'll somehow hold me responsible for it.

To remedy such a situation, I've been working on a few items for baby in my own neutral color scheme - Gray & All the bright colors.  To my eyes, Gray and every-bold-color-but-pink can pass for neutral.  For some reason, once you throw in a good amount of pink (it'll still work in small quantities), I see girl.  It's sexist, it's American, but it's my eyes.

So in the Gray & All the bright colors scheme, let me introduce to you the first item I've made for Baby M!  

It's fashioned out of old t-shirts and some robot flannel circa the flannel-buying-blackout of 2011.
You know, the one where I remember looking at the fabrics on sale on Cyber Monday, and that's all I remember.
2 weeks later, 24 yards of flannel are delivered to my house.
Whoops.

Half of the top is pieced via the paper-piecing method I saw here.
Seriously, it takes little-to-no skill, and it's super fun.
A few additional emails with Quilty Girl (of the same website) helped me with some details-unique-to-old-t-shirts
She's super nice.

ASIDE: Do you think I should sign/personalize this in some way?  Like quilt a date on there, or write "To my babylove" or something?  Maybe a heart with "Baby M." inside?  This whole we-don't-know-what-your-name-is-yet thing is compounding the we-don't-know-your-gender issue...

The quilting is minimal on the quilt itself, although I did do a sort of quilt-as-you-go method.
Except I had no idea what I was doing.

I also turned this quilt (instead of doing a binding).
I haven't done that since my first quilt, when I had NO idea what I was doing.
It was a queen-size, and I actually had to crawl inside of it to get the corners just right.

I'm really excited.  I'm also having a hard time picturing our baby (said incredulously) actually using it.  Still seems a little surreal, although I definitely wouldn't want to be carrying around this thing forever, what with the kicking and the rolling and the I-can't-see-my-feet of it all.  I've got a few more quilt ideas for this kid (because I LOVE blankets/quilts and think you can never have enough), and also some other smaller projects.  It felt so good to create again.  And to sit down for the majority of the afternoon, I was one tired girl!

Hope you're having a great weekend!  Last night Handsome & I (I got to see him, and I recognized him right away, once he re-introduced himself to me) checked out the local Oktoberfest, which was local and charming and I can't wait to show you pictures.  And today, he's home for a good bit, and we're having a pumpkin-carving date!  He doesn't know it yet, but I've got a 47-lb pumpkin in the back of my Jeep with his name on it.  I did just realize (a) I forgot candles for inside and (b) I'll probably need a half-dozen votives just to light his up, but we'll make it work.

Peace, Love, and Robots,

TFW