It's a Jungle out There: Part I

This post is neither spooky nor nerdy.  You have been warned.

I have a very large family; counting the steps and halves, there are eleven children.  Throw in my cousins and friends, and it seems like I'm making a baby quilt every few months.  This one is for one of my step-brothers, who is expecting (along with his fiancée, of course) a boy next month.

And it seems like they're usually quilts featuring baby jungle animals; this is the fifth I've made in four years.  I'm not sure why this theme is so popular, but it's okay - it means there are a lot of different fabrics to chose from.  I chose Patty Reed's Jungle Babies for this go.  It's available from a number of different retailers, including fabric.com and JoAnn's.

I have a love-hate relationship with quilting. While I do enjoy the designing and piecing, I don't particularly care for the actual quilting.  I don't do elaborate designs, because I get frustrated by them, and I don't do large quilts, because I get bored before I'm done.  Therefore, a patchwork baby quilt just right for a weekend project. I was planning on finishing the whole thing this weekend, but it was ridiculously hot here.  Quilting in the heat is not fun.  Even just piecing the top today (which was about ten degrees cooler than yesterday) was unpleasant.  I will finish this off sometime this week, hopefully. This is my first experience with a quilting panel (the large piece in the middle).  I have never run across one that I particularly cared for, but as I said, this is the fifth baby animals quilt, so I wanted to introduce some variety.  It took some meddling to get everything to align correctly with the panel, but it wasn't too bad.

My apologies for the weird angle of the picture; I had to place it on the living room floor and photograph it from stairs.