Isaac's Friendship Galaxy Quilt

I have a fun baby quilt finish to share this week, my first finish of the year. In fact, the year was only 10 1/2 hours old when I finished stitching on the binding 😊 Hopefully that means I'll have a productive year with lots of finishes!

This Friendship Galaxy quilt is for little baby Isaac, our great-nephew. (Want to suddenly feel really old? Just realize you are a great-aunt and poof, there you go, suddenly old!) I had hoped to have pictures of Isaac on his quilt, since I was supposed to get to meet him on Monday, but sickness and bad weather prevented it, so I'll have to share those pictures another time.

This is the second Friendship Galaxy quilt I've made (you can see the one I made for Judah here). I wanted to make it a second time because a) it's a fun quilt and b) the background fabric I chose for Judah's quilt was quite busy and I wanted to see how the quilt would look with a simpler background. I really like the simpler background, and now I want to try making it with a light background and darker stars...so many possibilities!

If you'd like to explore the possibilities too, the pattern is available in my Etsy shop, and includes three other size options.

I made one giant friendship star to put on the back of the quilt.

I love how the simple stippling with stars looks on the back. The thread I used really blended in with the background fabric on the front, but it stands out better on the mottled grey backing fabric.

When I went to make the binding, I searched for the piece of background fabric I *know* I have and that I had set aside for the binding, but I couldn't find it. Since I thought I'd soon be gifting the quilt, I really wanted to get it finished, so I went with solid black instead. Turns out, I really like the solid black!

Fun fact - we have a lot of snow already this year. So much snow that walking across my backyard for these pictures was nearly impossible as I was sinking to my knees with every step. It's hard to pick out the depth, but here's one of my footprints.

What's a quilt blogger to do? I needed pictures and there's snow everywhere, so I headed back to the house and got my snowshoes 😊 I'm sure the neighbors thought I was crazy, snowshoeing back and forth across the yard, stringing a rope between trees and hanging up quilts, but hey, I got my pictures!

As some of you may know, I struggle with photography sometimes and I had already tried taking pictures of another quilt in the snow and the pictures were horrible. Really grey and dingy looking and not at all what I wanted. After a little reading about taking pictures in snow I discovered that using the flash setting on your camera for the white balance (not actually using the flash) can fix some of the dinginess in snow pictures. I gave it a try and the pictures in this post are the result. Still not perfect, especially because it was around 3 in the afternoon when I took the pictures, so there were lots of shadows, but they are much brighter than before. The snow and the quilt both look less awful than in my other pictures, so I'm pleased with the progress. Since this looks like it will be a very snowy winter, it's good to know I can still get decent quilt pictures...so long as I wear my snowshoes, of course!

Here's the quilt, one more time 😊

Have you finished anything yet this year? If you have a blog post about it, let me know in the comments so I can check it out 😊 And don't forget to get your copy of the Friendship Galaxy pattern!