My friend Marissa is awesome. For many reasons. One of them is that she knows I’m a fabric junkie and she enables me. She brought me a whole stack of fabric the last time she visited that came from a stash she had inherited. She picked out everything that was pink and/or particularly loud to give to me. Like I said, she’s awesome. (I’ve made mother/daughter pajamas from some of what she gave me). One of the fabrics was this amazing rainbow zebra cotton broadcloth. Marissa was pregnant at the time and not-so-subtly hinted that she would be super happy to have a baby blanket made from the zebra fabric (and who needs subtlety between friends anyway).

Well, I took her “hint” and made a baby blanket for her brand-new munchkin! I decided to make it a whole-cloth quilt (meaning no cutting and piecing to make the quilt top) and quilt it on my mom’s longarm quilting machine. This is the first quilt that I’ve finished on a longarm (I’m half-way through my 2012 BOM quilt that I’ll finish someday, I swear) and I had a lot of fun with it! I kept the quilting really simple since I’m a total n00b at longarm quilting (though I fortunately had my expert mom standing by to help me when the tension decided to act up). I think the rainbow thread is exactly what the simple quilting needed to make it really pop (all credit goes to my mom for having it in her thread stash).

I remember buying the fabric I used for the back for a very particular reason, but I have no recollection of what that reason was so I used it for the quilt back since I wanted a fabric that brought out the rainbow (and already being in my stash was a major bonus). The binding is left over from the Fancy Forest Pillows that I made for Evelyn. I was delighted to know that Marissa loves the quilt, and even more delighted that I got to meet her little babe in person right after he came home!