After I'd finished Hearts and Flowers, I immediately started working on two baby quilts for twins. And no, I'm not a masochist; the babies belonged to a work colleague, and since I was leaving the job I really needed to have the quilts done before I left and headed to England on vacation, hence my unusual haste in sewing.

But I digress. The design was inspired by a quilt I saw at the Dallas Quilt Festival; it was a baby quilt that used a combination of nine patch and snowball squares, with white as the background color and accent squares/triangles in a variety of pretty pastel patterned fabrics. The effect was extremely bright and pretty, and the bonus about doing these patchwork patterns was that they could be cut and sewed together very quickly, unlike my last quilt. Ahem.

Of course, I don't really do pastels, so I figured I'd replace the pastels with my signature batiks. Now, I have to admit that I was a little worried when I started working on the central section of the first quilt, because the colors were so strong I wasn't sure if it would work as a baby quilt. However, when I put on the inner stripe and the wide white border I realized they pulled everything together very nicely.

These quilts are also my first foray into freehand quilting -- the straight lines of the quilt are done in a lattice pattern, but there's an interlinked circle of loops and hearts freehanded in each of the snowball squares. To do freehand quilting, you drop the dogs (the metal "teeth" that move the fabric back and forth) on the sewing machine, attach a darning foot, set the stitch length to the smallest possible and start stitching along a pattern you'd traced earlier as fast as you can.

And believe me, that's sort of a scary thing -- I did a sample square to practice my technique, but when you start doing something like that on a quilt you realize rather quickly that you could well and truly screw everything up with one slip of your hand/attention (since the stitches are so small, they are an incredible pain to snip out. Yes, I screwed up a couple of times).

In addition to the lattice and freehand quilting, I used a three-inch pattern of spikes and curves on the outer border, then finished each quilt with a complimentary binding that matched the thin inner border. Amusing story -- the first quilt is the one with the yellow border, and I worked on it all the way through the Tour de France. The second quilt, with the green border, was working on during a variety of surgery shows on TLC, Style and E! (what can I say -- I'm addicted to Dr. 90210). If there's anything to the theory of sympathetic vibrations, the twin who gets the yellow quilt could turn into a world-class cyclist, while the other twin may very well become a plastic surgeon. Only time will tell.