boxed up beauty and the beast quilt

i'm in LOVE with this quilt!
for being a (huge) baby quilt, it couldn't have turned out any better.
and the best part?  it went to live at my best friend's house for her sweet baby girl.when erika was pregnant with jackson, figuring out the fabric for that quilt was a breeze.  (see it here!)  but when it came to this little one, i was at a complete loss of what to do.  do i do another winnie the pooh one?  do i do something simple and basic?  do i make it match her nursery?  WHAT DO I DO???
so the plan just sat.
and sat and sat and sat.  until one day, someone posted a thread in a quilting group i'm in asking what fabric lines everyone is drooling over.  then, someone in the comments shared the riley blake beauty and the beast fabric line, and as soon as i saw it, i was putting a fat quarter bundle in my cart and calling it a day. i don't think i quite had an exact plan right off the bat, except that this fabric needed to happen.

i knew cluck cluck sew had easy, awesome, fat quarter friendly patterns, so i cruised through their selection and decided on the boxed up quilt.  this pattern featured the fun prints in a great way, without chopping them up and eliminating everything that was cute about them.  once the fabric arrived, it was then time to decide on a background color.

i could have easily done white, but that would have been asking for danger with a baby quilt.  my first instinct was green, then i started to second guess it... i tried some pinks, i looked at dear stella moonscape dots, but my eyes and my heart came back to the konas.  i landed on kona asparagus, which was the perfect shade of green to go with the leaves in the rose prints.  i also decided that more fabrics needed to be featured in this quilt.  the crib size only needed 7 fat quarters, and well... i just bought a full set of 18...
so what did i do?i went ahead and made the lap size version of the quilt!
sure, she's just a tiny baby right now, but now she can use it for years and years!  i also went ahead and used 15 of the fat quarters and changed up the ratio used in the quilt (3 sets of each when it was 10, down to 2 sets of each at 15).  i took out the three brown fat quarters, since they stood out SO MUCH.  i used my design wall to figure out the layout of the large blocks, but that part was actually the hardest.

the blue/yellow/pink ratios were a little mismatched, so it was harder to create a balance of everything when creating the final layout.  i had to fussy cut some of the smaller pieces for the sashing type strips, because i knew it would drive me CRAZY to have sideways prints.

i used a day at my parents to get the little strips thrown together and then sew together the complete quilt top.  once those little bits were all laid out, things went together pretty quickly.  minus the occasional cat laying in the middle of the project, but such is life.

i quilted it using a rose garden pantograph that i used on a previous quilt, because when you're doing beauty and the beast, it OBVIOUSLY has to be roses!  the backing and binding are out of the same rose print from the line, because as soon as i saw it, i couldn't imagine anything else to frame up the quilt.  the colors were perfect.

i mean cmon, just look at how cute that little beast guy is! erika was originally due on october 6th, but after little baby gemma decided to turn herself in the wrong way, she was induced at the end of september.  

that sure kicked finishing this quilt in to high gear, and i was sewing the binding on the day that she was born.  it took a little bit longer to get mailed out to her, due to finding a package the right size to fit it in... because poly mailers are MIA right now, like no other.  but i did receive word when it arrived, and that it is already well loved!this quilt turned out better than i could have imagined!
well, given that it started off with nothing imagined, i couldn't be more thankful to have stumbled across that riley blake line by way of the facebook group.

there is a secondary pattern that was also included in this, and i cannot wait to take a look at that and give it a go.  truth be told, i have SO many patterns i have purchased, i don't even know where to begin on some things!  i really just need to pull out all the ones i've done and work my way through them, even if it is just as a charity quilt to work through my stash (which i'm sure i've mentioned is way excessive and a bit overwhelming most of the time)

so here's to winding down the rest of 2020 with wrapping up current projects before blowing the roof of with the plans i have for 2021.  but first...
i'm really just itching to meet the little one that got this quilt and snuggle her.
texas is so far away though... :(

pattern information: boxed up by cluck cluck sew

quilt count: 143