BIG elephant quilt!

This is the quilt I made for Kelly and Marc's baby, Alex. I first saw this quilt on the blog house on hill road and thought I could duplicate it. Then a couple weeks ago I was browsing the craft books at the local bookstore, and I saw the pattern for it in the book Quilts, Baby! So I bought the book. I only had two weeks to make a quilt before going down to LA to see Alex and I thought this would be easy. The pattern was really nothing more than I got off the blog - just the outline of the elephant to enlarge, and general instructions. The applique is fused on, and handling that large of an applique is more challenging than I thought. I drafted the pattern directly onto the paper side of the fusible webbing, and had to tape two pieces together to get it big enough. It's hard to tell from the picture how big it is, but the quilt overall is 38 x 54, so that's one big elephant applique!

Once I started playing around with fabrics, I found I liked this color scheme of gray, blue, black, and green, and pulled some fabrics that I had to use. Who would have thought of using gray for baby quilt? The quilt back was part of the pattern in the book, and the fabric is a Denyse Schmidt fabric I found on sale at Peapod Fabrics. I thought I was being really clever to incorporate the quilt label into the strip on the back, then realized that the quilting lines criss-crossed it. It's OK, though. There's another similar quilt by this same designer, Erin Harris, that is a giraffe. Maybe I'll try it for the next baby!