High-Contrast Baby Quilt

 by Alisa

This quilt is a project that started with an idea I had had awhile ago to make a black and white baby quilt. I had seen somewhere that babies love to look at high-contrast items:

"Newborns' color perception is limited to white, black and shades of grey, because their eyes and capacity for sight are not fully developed at birth. As a result, babies loves to look at high-contrast black-and-white patterns, which stand out in their blurry worlds, attracting their attention and helping them focus." from Advantages of Black and White in Developing Newborns' Vision.

Then I fell in love with a fat-quarter bundle that my mom bought -- "Linework" by Tula Pink for FreeSpirit Fabrics. As soon as I saw that fabric, I knew I wanted to make a high-contrast quilt, but for who?  Luckily, I found a purpose when I realized I had a baby shower coming up for a couple who would appreciate a modern vibe.

I thought that half-square triangles would be fun but wanted a pattern as a guide to color placement. I owned the "Maid Modern" by Shelly Morgan for Coral + Co pattern, and decided to use that as the jumping off point. 

"Maid Modern" is a lovely black, white, steel, grey, shell, ivory, and gold design.  I swapped the blush and steel for the "Linework" dot fabrics Pom Poms Paper and Pom Poms Ink, and the gold for the "Linework" stripe Tent Stripe Paper.

I made up my blocks using remaining colors in the pattern -- Kona Solids by Robert Kaufman in Quicksilver, Ivory, White and Black. 

I sewed the half-square-triangles into rows per the pattern instructions, and laid the rows out, but wasn't quite happy -- so I tried several layouts.

In the end I decided to remove the row with the three ivory blocks, and replace one ivory triangle with a stripe -- settling on this smaller, more baby-friendly layout:

I chose another fabric from Tula Pink's "Linework" collection for the backing. Fairy Flakes Ink is an amazing tone-on-tone print with swooping birds, stars, hearts and dots in deep grey on a black background.

I had the project quilted by Laura of KootsiQuilting in light-grey thread in the "Stars on a String" allover pattern and a medium-loft batting. 

KootsiQuilting offers pickup and dropoff of projects, but this time my mom -- my chief binding expert! -- offered to pick it up and finish it for me.  She bound the 40"x46" quilt with the remaining Tent Stripe fabric which was the perfect piano-key final touch.  

Then the quilt was ready to wrap and gift!

I hope Baby Boy finds his quilt exciting when he arrives in September!