The Goldilocks Quilt - A Scrappy Bear Paw Quilt

I have a dear friend who had a set of twins just a couple months before I had my baby boy.
Needless to say, I never got around to making baby quilts for her girls!

When I found out they were expecting a little brother, I knew I had to make something,
but I couldn't just make the little brother a quilt and have the girls be left out!

So I decided I'd make an extra big and snuggly quilt
for my friend, her husband, and their three little baby bears to share.



It is always such a fun challenge to design a quilt for a friend.
I love trying to transcribe their personality into colors and pattern.

She is such a fun mix of modern and traditional,
and she and her family love being outdoors, camping, and adventuring.
(I mean, she used to teach college geology - this is a family that knows how to adventure!)

I thought the bear paw block would be the perfect traditional pattern
(with it's outdoorsy name and long quilting history)
and loved how graphic, bold, and modern it looked blown up to a large scale.

Of course the color scheme had to be green!
But it needed to be a warm combination of dark, humble, earthy greens,
and bright, youthful, spring greens.
Well we all know how much I love scrappy quilts, so scrappy it was!



Since this was going to be a quilt for the whole family,
I also wanted to try and bridge the gab between
"baby quilt" and "company is coming let's put our best quilt on the couch" quilt.

So I kept the bold, extra large, bear paws in a clean white
and made the background the scrappy element.
I love how large areas of scraps like this look like they shimmer!

For the babies, I thought it would be fun to sneak some I-Spy novelty prints in with the scraps.
Unfortunately, my green novelty stash was severely limited.

Here comes my favorite part of this quilt -

I put a shout out on Instagram to see if anyone had green I-Spy scraps they could trade me,
and I was so astonished by the result!

About a dozen of you fabulous quilters sent me the most adorable and precious little bits
of bears, and mushrooms, and little camper vans -
they could not have been more perfect for this quilt!

I will be so forever grateful to everyone who sent a little bit for this quilt,
thank you all again.





For the backing, I used a whole lot of Kona Pickle,
and a strip of leftover scraps to piece it together.
Pickle might be one of my new favorite colors,
such a perfect mix between happy spring green and yummy 70s green!



I knew I wanted to be able to quilt it on my domestic machine at home,
which meant I had to do something with straight lines (haha!).

I used a variegated green thread and made 1" stripes back and forth on the green areas,
but left the white areas mostly un-quilted to help them pop.
The quilting was definitely NOT my favorite part of the process,
but I think it came out pretty dang well considering.



This is the second quilt I've bound in the Cotton + Steel dots print
(which is really saying something considering I've only finished two quilts in the past while!).
I just love how it adds the perfect amount of interest.



Overall I am SO very pleased with this quilt!
It finished at 76"x76" (had to make sure it fit the whole family!)
and used just under 300 Half Square Triangles,
and all of the green I had in my stash!

When my friend came over for me to give it to her and we laid it out on the ground,
there were immediately babies crawling, jumping, and dancing all over it.
So I'm pretty confident in saying that they like it too.