baby wish quilt- part one

i'm trying to keep confident that i have not bitten off more than i can chew in attempting to make my soon-to-be-born daughter a quilt. i think a large part of my apprehension comes from the very large and impressive example that my mom set for me and that i feel, in part, that i should live up to even though i know even with the experience she had in quilting, i may never quite reach. she made her incredible works of art look so easy, and she did them for the pure enjoyment of making and giving them away, usually.

so, though much more simple than what my mom could have whipped up in her spare time, i am attempting a quilt. and i really think i can do it! the part that might not quite happen is having it done before the baby comes, although it is high on my get-done-before-she-comes list.

the quilt started with an idea... having ladies at my baby shower write a one-word prayer or blessing that would be then embroidered and pieced into a quilt, wrapping the baby in prayers.of course, being a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl, with no regard for silly things like patterns or measurements, simply blocking and putting together this really simple quilt has become a challenge!

here are the blocks i started with, written in wash-off fabric pen. you can see to the right some of the other fabrics i'll be using for the other blocks:

you can tell where i've started to machine-embroider some of the words... good thing i like my quilts a little wrinkly-looking, like they were washed and dried on the clothesline! there are several left to embroider, and i'm realizing that if i want them all to be legible, i'm going to have to do a combination of machine and hand-embroidering.

the most recent thing i've done is start adding some of the blocks, figuring out what fabrics i want to use and if i have enough of it available (i'm making it all from fabrics of my mom's, to give K a memory and connection to her nana). i ended up having to go back over and re-embroider some of the ends of some of the letters to be sure they don't unravel.

so this is the state it sits in right now, with only a little over 6 weeks to go until this baby is here! i'm also feeling a bit of pressure, because i found out about this baby quilt competition from make-baby-stuff.com, and think it would be awesome to enter. but since the deadline is november 1st, i don't see that likely to happen.

i am trying to keep it as simple as possible to get it done quickly... even though i had this fabulous quilt binding tutorial from the lovely heather bailey, it was still worrying me and i'm not sure how well i can handle that part. instead, i'm going to use an even easier turn-it-inside-out and stitch-the-edge-flat method from amy butler's lotus brick path quilt, one of the free patterns on her website!