Lil' Retro Baby Revisit

It's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side again!  Such a pleasure to view all the wonderful entries during each quilt show.  For my second entry into the Spring 2013 Festival, I'm entering 'Lil' Retro Baby' into the Baby Quilt category.  My first entry is in the Scrap Quilt category.

Lil' Retro Baby

This is a quilt I finished up and gifted to my cousin last year, but it still holds a special place in my list of completed quilts.  Working with solid fabric was (and still is) completely out of my normal comfort zone and I admit to struggling a bit with it.

A peek inside my process

I bought a stack of fat quarters and then impulsively included a couple extra pieces that I thought would help balance out the color arrangement. You know that the very idea of working with ALL solid colors was practically guaranteed to paralyze me into indecision given that I had been taught that solid colors were the scrap quilters ultimate 'no, no'!  Eventually, after much waffling, I decided to just start cutting and sewing which resulted in a few chunky looking blocks.  My design wall is pretty small so I quickly ended up arranging the various blocks on the floor.  Ha!  I'm sure you already figured that out.

Anyway, it worked better than you might think and actually got my brain to start processing what needed to happen next. I moved the first several blocks round and round, trying to imagine the end result in my mind.  I played with my fabric bits and pieces, thinking about how to join big blocks and little ones all without ending up with funky set in seams. Finally, it occurred to me that I simply wasn't going to be happy until I added in a very few pieces of printed fabric.  Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater!  Oh well.  So my first solid color quilt ended up with a printed fabric.  Next time I'll work harder to get it right. lol