After finishing Bow Ties in Baby Blue for my nephew Braden, it was time to return to a baby quilt I'd actually started earlier for a certain baby in Sacramento (I'd had to put the quilt to one side when I couldn't find the right shade of mottled aqua blue fabric I wanted for the border -- turns out that after I'd bought some aqua batik online, I found a great quilting store in Irving that carried some absolutely perfect marbled aqua Moda fabric. Go figure).

Another bright batik-laden quilt seemed appropriate for a little girl living in California, so I dug through my ever-growing collection of batik fat quarters and created a central section of snowball/ninepatch block combos much like Rainbow Sherbert (Two Scoops). Instead of having white snowballs, I used the teal colorway of Ocean Songs - Mermaids by Laurel Burch and fussy cut each mermaid so that she'd fill a snowball. I originally created three rows of blocks with a pale blue background fabric instead of white, but eventually pitched it when I realized the blue, light as it was, just made everything look muddy.

A double 1" border of white and multicolored batik fabric completed the center section, and when I finally found that lovely aqua Moda fabric I turned that into a 4" border and bought a really cool quilting stencil that looked like rolling waves for it. The backing is teal Ocean Songs - Seahorses fabric, edged on either side with a strip of aqua because the OC-S swatch wasn't quite wide enough for the batting.

Then it was time to start quilting. The straight lines outlining the squares and checkerboard pattern of the central section was easy enough, as was the rolling waves pattern around the border (I tried doing that with freehand quilting first, but the result looked way too rough and crude so I picked out the teeny tiny stitches and used my regular walking foot instead).

As I finished, however, I realized that the unquilted mermaid snowballs seemed to stick out too much. I didn't want to put a geometric quilt pattern in them, however, as I didn't want the quilting to clash with the mermaid design.

There was really only one thing I could do. So I sucked it up, put the open-toed darning foot back on the machine, and freehand quilted the outline and details on each mermaid. I have to admit, I was absolutely terrified that this was going to look like secondhand poo, but to my surprise it turned out to be gorgeous. Each mermaid seemed to "pop" from her sea background, and the extra texture added visual and tactile interest to the quilt.

After a liberal application of Shout to get rid of the marking lines (turns out it gets rid of plain old pen ink just fine -- no need to use water-soluble quilting pencils anymore, yay!) the quilt came out of the dryer this morning looking like a million bucks. I signed it (yeah, I know it sounds pretentious, but I sign all my quilts partially so that there's a record of who made the quilt, and partially because I'm sortakinda hoping to be famous some day and it may add to the value of the quilt), called Michelle to make sure I had her correct address, then wrapped the quilt in a Central Market plastic bag (only the best carrier bags for my friends, dontchaknow) and mailed it off to sunny Cali. May baby Delia snuggle with it for years to come.