I was recently commissioned to do a baby quilt by a family friend.  She wanted a quilt that felt Australian without being too overtly Aussie.  After much discussions and looking at some quilt reference we settled on the idea of “A Sunburnt Country”.  There is a fabulous old Australian Poem, whose most famous stanza is:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

With the inspiration in mind, I  ended up creating this…

I only finished the top last night, after I got back from the Portland Modern Quilting Guild.  It is made up of  378 three-inch squares and measures  45 inches wide by 52 1/2 inches tall.

I pieced this quilt together in sections, a trick I learned from a Oh Fransson’s post about her Sparkle punch quilt.  This process worked wonders and made it (a) less daunting to piece and (b) easier to align the blocks.  I worked in 6 x 6 block sections.

As you can tell from this dodgy photo, I struggled with the darker purple fabrics.  I had to dig deep into the fabric stash to find enough appropriate fabrics to finish off the top corners of the quilt.

When laying out this quilt I did play with a couple of colour variations, including replacing the purple with browns and with adding some green into the mix.  Neither of these options worked well, particularly seeing this was a baby quilt for a girl.  In the spirit of girly fun, when I was selecting my fabric I had a great time finding novelty and fussy cuts prints.  Hidden in the quilt are elephants, dogs, chairs, boats, deer,  flags, flowers, stars, ducks, oranges, lady bugs, bees,  bears, hearts and so much more.

This weekend I will hopefully get the top basted and ready for quilting next week.  I have been so focused on completing quilt tops that I have not actually finished a quilt for over a week.  I am definitely slacking!