Sleep Tight panel quilt

Well hello there! I can't believe I haven't posted anything since November!  I have been sewing a lot, mostly quilts but also some clothes for me and my son.  So to back up a bit this quilt was gifted to a friend's baby in December.  When I saw the panel I thought it would be perfect for one of the baby quilts I had planned. The panel is a Cotton + Steel fabric, from the Sleep Tight collection by Sarah Watts and you should still be able to see it here.

When I ordered the panel I asked Kate for advice on co-ordinating solids so she picked out the blue & the pink which both match perfectly.  I decided on adding triangles to echo the shape of the mountain and the tree and found this tutorial for doing half rectangle triangles.   I really enjoyed making these half rectangle triangles and working out how I was going to put it all together.  I realise it's a very simple design but it was still nice trying to work it out and I'd like to do more quilts where I don't follow complete quilt patterns.  Once it was together I felt it needed something else as a border so added the striped fabric (bought for another quilt which will hopefully get finished soon).  The backing fabric is 'minky fabric' which I bought at the Festival of Quilts last August.  So this doesn't actually have any quilt batting in it, instead I just used the quilt front with the minky fabric then did a bit of machine quilting on top.  I used my standard technique for binding which is to make double-fold bias binding, machine stitch it to the front then blind stitch by hand on the reverse.  The minky fabric makes this so lovely and soft and as it's not quite so big I thought it might be useful as a pram blanket.

When I think back to my first few quilts I do wonder how they're holding up to washing as I had no idea about how to finish the threads off and just knotted them on the outside.  Since then though I've been using a technique for finishing the threads by hiding them inside the quilt.  This is a really good video tutorial which explains it much better than I can!

It was nice to work with a panel in the centre and plan the quilt design round that and I'm so pleased with how this turned out!