A finished baby quilt.

Here it is, the finished baby quilt I told you about in this post.
It took me far longer than I had expected to finish it.
And of course - just in case my family was reading this blog - I couldn't show you the final result before I presented the quilt to my niece.
About the finishing touches:
I found inspiration in this book:

I used the pattern of this little bird, I just reduced the size:

Here is my bird:

I machine embroidered all around the body and wing and hand -embroidered the eye, beak and legs.

As another detail, I took a bird image from "Wing study in pastille" from the Botanika collection from Paula Prass.

Here you can see this fabric collection.

I hand-embroidered around it and got this result:

The biggest work was the quilting.

I decided to use freehand quilting for the off-white cotton around the blocks. My Bernina machine was very happy to do all the stitching for me using the BSR foot. I just had to guide her? all the way. 
This quilting made the coloured blocks come forward.
Have a look:

This freehand quilting also gave a gorgeous pattern on the back.
Look:

I added a Zest4colour label

and finished  the quilt by hand-quilting the binding to the back of the quilt, this way:



I used a lovely DMC pearl cotton tapestry thread to do this.
Here are some final pictures:

I can humbly say that this quilt was a big success at our family gathering for Christmas.

I was a bit sad to have to let it go.

Have a lovely end-of-year weekend.
Kristien