I finally finished the baby quilt "Bow Ties in Baby Blue" for my nephew Braden, and it's in the wash with Shout hopefully removing all of the quilting mark lines as I type. The design for this one is more architectural than my other quilts and not really what you can call a quintessential baby quilt, but I do like it. Hopefully his parents will get a kick out of it, too -- and hey, if they can use it as a decorative element later on, all the better.

Once again, I'm continuing to push the envelope on my quilting skills, as this one had a LOT more freehand quilting than I've ever done before -- as well as doing looped motifs in the white blocks, I also did an outer border of linked diamonds using the regular walking foot, then took a deep breath and stipple stitched the spaces between the diamond links and the center section.

Aaaand a lot of readers just went, "Wha?"

Okay, definition time -- stipple stitching is a continuous, closely placed meandering line that can be used to fill in an area of a quilt -- see the picture below and look at the stitching in the light blue fabric for an example. Ideally, a stippled line never makes a sharp turn and never crosses itself (unless your cat, who likes to climb up behind the sewing machine and rub his cheeks over it, decides to leap down at an unfortunate time, but I'm not naming names). As a result, it's a good way to fill in large open areas and creates a nice texture in the quilt fabric.

I like the technique, but for some reason my machine kept cocking up the top thread tension -- when I turned the piece over, all I saw was rows and rows of looped thread underneath the quilt. Which, of course, had to be cut out and restitched. Arrgh. My only option was to set the top tension so high that it pulled a tiny bit of the bottom thread up to the top layer -- not normally a problem, but I used two different color threads this time so you can really see the bottom thread.

What the hell -- if anyone asks I'll say it's a feature.

And I have to say, I completely and utterly adore the border fabric with the cherubs -- I actually bought that first and based the color family of the quilt around it. Somehow, it just seemed appropriate for a baby boy's quilt.