Bear Paw

This is my latest quilt, which I realise looks quite similar to my last quilt. I'm so into this blue, yellow, white & black colour combination at the moment! This turned out exactly as I imagined it would and I'm so pleased with the finished quilt.  I used the last of my Little Critters animal panels, the owl and the bear.  When I decided not to use all 4 panels in my Little Critters quilt  I knew I wanted to keep the bear for this specific baby quilt and decided the owl would pair best with the bear and the fox with the rabbit.

This quilt was named the Bear Paw quilt after the block pattern I've used, the Bear Paw (funnily enough!).  There are lots of tutorials online for making this block pattern and the one I used was brilliant as it had instructions and size guides for making 3 different sized blocks.  I went with the biggest sized block, 14", as this was what corresponded most closely to the size of the animal panels.  It was a bit too small so I had to add 2.5" (including s/a) to each side of the blocks to make them the same size as the animal blocks.  The block is made up of half-square triangles, squares and rectangles and came together a lot more quickly than the checkerboard ninepatch pattern on my Little Critters Quilt (I found out the name of that other panel from a commenter on my Pattern Review write up of making the quilt - I love Pattern Review!). This quilt ended up being 29.5" x 33.25" in size.

I had enough scraps of the blue left and the white & black dash fabrics but I had to do a quick purchase of the triangle fabric (from the same Thicket Range for Moda as the animal panels) to bulk it out a bit, and buy another metre of yellow from a local fabric shop which I used on the front and back.  The gorgeous blueberry print fabric I used on the back of the quilt is fabric I've had for ages (I think I bought half a metre) and it looks perfect with the yellow.  This was the first time I made a quilt label and it's definitely something I want to start doing with all my quilts.  After doing some research online I bought Sakura Pigma Micron 05 Drawing Pens in blue & black as I'd read they didn't run or come out in the wash.  I did a few testers first and found that on some fabrics the writing bled a bit but on others it didn't so I picked a fabric it worked well on then washed it to check it didn't run in the wash - it didn't.  I've blocked it out in the photo above as I put the baby's name and date of birth on it but you can see part of it in the photo below.  I attached it to the back of the quilt with a zigzag stitch.

The quilting is straight lines 1" apart, except the animals which I quilted around the lines but not inside.  The binding was made and sewn on using the Purl Soho tutorials which I always look at to refresh my memory -
Making Double Fold Binding
Sewing on Double Fold Binding

Once again I'm so pleased with how this quilt turned out.  I know I've still so much to learn, in particular I want to experiment more with machine quilting and try out some more adventurous designs rather than just straight lines.  I also know I need to read up a bit more on how to finish off the quilt lines on the back of the quilt as I've been knotting them off and it looks a bit untidy. One technique I read said to make the stitches really small at either end then you don't need to knot but I've not been confident enough that it would hold together without knots. Has anyone any advice they can offer me on this? Any resources I should check out?

You can see the wee knots here.

While making this quilt I was also playing around with some of the scraps from these last two quilts and have an almost finished improvised quilt front. I just need a few more wee bits to finish it off! Well at least I think I only need to fill that one space for it to look completed? What do you think?  Improvising is so much fun, I really want to do some more of it!