Bloggers Quilt Festival - Piper's Pink Garden

This is my very first entry into the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I call it "Piper's Pink Garden".

I really wish I had more (better!) pictures of it, but I made this before I started blogging, so no close-ups, I'm afraid.

It is only the third actual pieced quilt that I had made, and the first quilt I dared to do any real free-motion quilting on.  And my previous pieced quilts were very simple.  This quilt was really a step up for me.

For those reasons alone it is a pretty special quilt for me - but there is more to the story of why I love it.

A little backstory:

I currently live in the beautiful state of Virgina.  But before that, I lived in a military town in North Carolina for five years.  Duriing that time, I made some very wonderful friends.  Better friends, at least in my opinion, than I could ever dream of meeting anywhere else.  Maybe partly because we were all military wives and we "got" each other and the situation we were in together, but I think more because God put these awesome ladies in my life to help with the lonliness of being a military wife with a deployed spouse. Either way, I totally feel blessed to know them.

Anyway, my BFF in North Carolina is Jenn.  I won't go into all the reasons I love her, let me just say that I do.  Dearly.

When I found out I was pregnant with my youngest son, she fell pregnant also.  Our due dates were less than a month apart.  I loved having a best friend that was pregnant at the same time!  We could commiserate together on the pains of being pregnant and semi-spouseless.   

Unfortunately, at about 5 months, my friend lost her baby.  It was hard and I felt really bad that I was still having a relatively uneventful, healthy pregnancy.  Fortunately, it didn't damage our friendship and about a month after I had Finn, she told me she was pregnant again. 

The most horrible part, however, was that I was moved to Virginia just as she told me.  So I was not able to be there to help her through her pregnancy while her husband was gone for a year-long deployment. 

Once she was over the hump, and felt more confident that this pregnancy was going to go full-term, she agreed to let another friend and I throw her a baby shower.  I knew I wanted to giver her a personal gift, for her because she is a beautiful friend, and also for her miracle baby whom she had worked so hard to get here safely.  So even though I was still relatively new to quilting, I decided I would make her a baby quilt. 

Her quilt was the biggest quilting project I had done to that point.  I wanted it to be perfect.
I knew I wanted it to have some kind of butterfly/garden theme and looked online forever deciding on the perfect fabric (Dream On by Urban Chiks), which was just out of print at the time and getting a bit hard to find.  I started with a simple charm pack, and ended up scouring the internet to purchase fabric at least 3 more times to find the pieces I needed/wanted before I was happy with how it turned out!

And  I was happy - thrilled! - with how it turned out!

  I thought then, and still do think it is such a pretty, perfect quilt for a sweet baby girl.  And my friend LOVED it, which made me happy, because, honestly, I was a little nervous to give it to her!  I wasn't sure if she would like it, and, as I said, it was my first time really doing an entire quilt in free motion, so my confidence in my skills was not the highest.

I love this quilt.  I love who it went to.  I love that I was able to put so much love and time and effort into it, and that the love was felt and received.  This is probably still, my favorite quilt I have ever made.