A different kind of patchwork

A friend of mine from high school recently had a baby girl. I don't know all of the details, but my friend has some pretty serious health issues, and ended up on bed rest for several weeks. I can't even imagine how boring that must have been, so I wanted to send her something special for her baby girl. I had a layer cake of Farm Fresh and decided to try creating an oversized Disappearing 9-Patch block. I used the 10" layer cake slices as the basis for the D9P....and I hated it. There wasn't enough variety in this fabric line to give the quilt a sufficiently scrappy feel. I hadn't sewn the D9P blocks together yet, so I played around with it on my design wall and eventually decided to just chop the blocks up some more. I cut each of the blocks into 4 pieces and mixed them up until I had this:

Unfortunately, the animals in the largest print were chopped up a bit. But I like the overall feel of this layout a lot more. I quilted this in the ever popular orange peel style, and it was a lot of fun! I chose to quilt it free motion, which I think was a lot laster than using a walking foot. In the process of researching this quilt style I developed my own way of achieving this design, which seemed a lot easier to me than some of the other methods out there. I have another  baby quilt in the works right now, so hopefully I can snap some in-process pictures to show how I like to quilt the orange peel.

The above photo shows the quilting pretty well, although the photo is a bit dark!

I used the DS Quilts pink dots (from JoAnn's) for the binding. The colors went so well with this line!

For the backing I used three more DS Quilts prints.

I really like the softness that this quilt has because of the widely spaced quilting. I will definitely use this quilting design again soon!