Magenta Bird Tree Quilt

I am completely obsessed with Saffron Craig fabric. Especially the Bird Tree range in magenta and green. If you haven't discovered her, check out her online store here - it is totally worth it, I promise! Her fabrics are just beautiful!

I have made a few quilts using her fabrics (Beetle Bugs and indigo Bird Tree) - and I happily have a lot more of them left in my stash. I really wasn't sure how I was going to use the magenta bird tree fabrics though - until I came across this tutorial (thanks Alissa!!). So I based this quilt loosely on Alissa's Sparks baby quilt.

I made the inner blocks a bit bigger, and added an extra border of fabric around each block, but the general design is the same. Apart from the Bird Tree fabric, I used Kona solids (hyacinth, plum, cactus and black) and Amy Butler quilting solids in fuchsia. I have to admit I felt a bit weird using black in a baby quilt, but it works so well with the other colours!

 I quilted along the black sashing 1/4" away from each seam, but because the blocks are so big I needed to do some more.

It took me ages to decide what to do - I toyed with free motion quilting the solid areas in each block (leaving the centre square un-quilted), but decided to hand-quilt around each centre square instead. I used DMC embroidery thread (from my past life as a cross-stitch fanatic :) )

 I really, really love this quilt - definitely my favorite I have made!