Oh, Lucy! Lucy the Lion Baby Quilt

Might this be our last baby quilt that we have free rein on creativity and design? Who cares?! Lucy the Lion baby quilt is all finished and now baby boy J can come any day now. He had to wait until it was finished so that his newborn pictures could be taken in a timely manner. His due date is March 3rd – that is only FIVE days away. Phew!

Lucy Free Rein

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we found out the gender of baby boy J last October. Sweet little Addison dunked a basketball that opened and sprayed her and daddy with blue sparkly dust.

It really didn’t matter the gender, though, because we had already decided to make a Lion baby quilt. It only made sense after an elephant and a giraffe for the older siblings, right?!

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Of course, with time galore we didn’t hurry to start working on Lucy. Plenty of time, we told ourselves (or it may just have been me saying that). We have almost five months until we have to have it finished!

Lucy Working Stage

Sue and I both kept an eye out for a cute lion design option. There are so many sources to choose from, like books, coloring books, and of course, the internet. Lucy had to be friendly-looking and not too realistic, yet enough to know that she is a Lion. And she’s not a lioness in spite of her gender and name . . .

That sweet little smile coupled with the colorful drum won us over, and we had a design idea. Selecting fabrics and making appliqué pieces was the next step. This baby quilt is going to receive a lot of washing, plus it has to stand up to those little fingers examining every inch. Turned-edge appliqué pieces were absolutely required, so we set about making them. Of course, it was only two short years ago that we were making George the giraffe for Addison. Could we recall exactly what product we used on the pieces? No, of course not. Yeah, we did out best guessing and sewing did commence.

Bright colors are our mainstay wheelhouse, so it should be no surprise to anyone that the drum has blue, red, and yellow sections with a green platform. Buttonhole stitching with black thread serves two purposes: first, it outlines the shapes so nicely and, two, the stitches are small and very secure.

Lucy Quilt Top and Completion

Sweet little Lucy the lion doesn’t have too many individual pieces, so appliqué went quickly. Lickety-split we have the center medallion complete and Sue auditioned colorful pieces for a first border. We had selected a light gray background so it made sense to add a second border of that same fabric.

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Once Lucy was to the quilt top stage, crosshatch quilting went very quickly. I started Saturday morning and by afternoon it was all complete except for adding the binding. Using blue painter’s tape is how I mark my first stitching line from corner to corner. I used a thread called Sunset Gray which is just perfect, I think. The quilting doesn’t stand out yet those wee fingers can still see the diamond shapes and try to pick them up!

Here’s a closeup of Lucy where you can see I stitched in the outline of her front legs. Without that definition she was one big blob of sameness. It also occurs to me now that I need to stitch in the bottom edge of the platform/drum. While the flags imply the shape very well, I might as well take a moment and add that line of stitching to complete it.

Ta-da! For Lucy’s glamor shot, there is plenty of snow and high snowbanks to pose the quilt on. However, they are slippery and hard to get close to even before we started the melt with warmer temperatures. This was the best I could do by myself! The snow is nice and powdery so it brushed right off the backing. Speaking of backing, we used this pretty Quarry print in Ivory that we picked up in 2019 with no real purpose. Of course, it’s not available any longer, darn it. Since it is a wide-backing at 108″, we have a good piece leftover for another baby or lap quilt. There you have it – we’re all ready for baby boy J to be born anytime now. You’ll have to come back to see him on the quilt . . .

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