Triangle Bear Paw baby quilt - gifting to friends.

Bear Paw baby quilt

I'm back with another Bear Paw quilt!  I can't seem to go very long without using this quilt block, there's just something so pleasing about it.  Excuse the poor lighting in these photos, it was too wet outside to get any photos (there has been a lot of very dreich weather recently here in London and my son is now learning all the Scottish words to describe this type of weather, for example, this morning's rain I would describe as smirr, which is quite a nice rain, light and soft.) Anyway, enough about the weather, and back to this quilt.  I made this for a friend's new baby.  This friend is very special to me (as all friends are!) and, during all the lockdowns and almost lockdowns of the past year & a half, our weekly walks in the forest together have made it all so much more bearable.  So this quilt is one way I have of showing that love and appreciation.  As another aside, isn't my son doing a great job as a quilt holder-upper?!

Bear Paw baby quilt

Once again I used this tutorial from In Color Order as a starting point. It's just a great, clear tutorial, and one day I'll try it as intended i.e. scrappy.  The triangle fabric, a Cloud 9 organic lawn if I remember rightly, was one I bought when a friend did an Instagram fabric destash.  I knew I wanted to use it in a quilt but to be honest the lawn fabric was a bit tricky to work with. Maybe a quilt in all lawn would be ok but mixing it with the different weights of both Kona solids (peach, green and white) and the Cirrus solid (blue) made it a bit harder.  I knew this before I started as I had the same issue with my Queue for the Zoo quilt last year, made with a Liberty print.

You can see the colours of the print a bit more in the photo above, it's a very peachy pink and the dark green is really lovely.  I had fun trying to match this with solids and bought two different Kona peach/coral shades to get the right one.  I love pink though so I know the one I didn't end up using will get used soon anyway.

The back of the quilt is just pieced together. This is something I really enjoy doing.  I had a small amount of the triangle fabric left and I wanted to use it all up so I started with that and just cut and stitched as I went.  It's really good fun to get a bit improv like that, especially after following a block pattern for the front of the quilt.  Spending time coming up with a design, and then sewing it up for loved ones, is such a nice way to spend time, it's time to be solitary and reduce stress whilst also being social somehow as you're thinking about the person/people you're creating it for.