Love Notes – The Courtship Quilt

Hello, quilty friends! It’s Stitch With Rachel here to show you my latest quilt that I have made from the gorgeous new collection, Love Notes, by Riley Blake Designs and Lindsay Wilkes of The Cottage Mama.

This collection features a range of soft pastel colours and animal images that were just destined to be a baby quilt. I am a big fan of medallion style quilts, so I decided to make the Courtship quilt by Missouri Star. The pattern can be found here. The pattern is written for 10″ squares so is perfect for using any precut fabrics that you may have.

There is alot of half square triangles (HST’s) to make with this pattern but once you have made those, the quilt top comes together pretty quickly. As this quilt was going to be for a baby, I customised the pattern for my needs and didn’t add on the final borders, including the row of flying geese so the quilt would be slightly smaller. The full finished quilt measure 87″ and mine finished at 60″.

Once all of the HST’s were sewn, it was fun to join them into the different configurations and then sew them row by row. I chose to use Riley Blake’s Dainty Daisy on cloud peony for the background fabfic, this added a nice pink detail.

I really enjoy the look and process of hand quilting, however it is not always possible to completly hand quilt every quilt that I make. For this project, I decided to machine quilt the whole top with a wavy stitch and then outline the centre stars with some hand quilting. I used DMC perle 8 thread in order for this to stand out against the pale background fabric. I used Riley Blake’s Shades in vintage blue for my quilt backing, and the pink hand quilting really pops on the back of the quilt.

And then it was off to the woods to take some shots of the completed quilt.

I have some left over HST’s and small scraps that I look forward to making into another project, maybe a matching pillow case or some scrappy english paper piecing projects.

If you would like to see more of my makes, I document my quilt making, fabric purchases and creative life over on my YouTube account. You can watch the vlog of me putting this quilt together here. If you enjoy any of my videos, leave me a comment, I always love hearing from fellow quilters.

Happy quilting,
Love, Rachel xx