my first baby quilt

My friends Matt & Kelly are having a baby girl in January, so I'm excited to be working on the first baby quilt I've ever made! I've seen lots of really great baby quilts around the blogosphere, and just hadn't had an excuse to make one myself yet.

When I found this bright, stripey fabric a while back, I thought it would make a great binding for a cheerful, colorful baby quilt. And when my latest package from the Fabric Shack came with several fabrics in similar colors all stacked nicely together, I had to just add a few more and make a quilt!
I've been doing a lot of thinking about brick-like patterns lately, and was thinking about doing something along those lines, but the thought of having to carefully piece all the strips together so that the vertical seams (the "mortar" between the short ends of the bricks) lined up on alternating rows made my head hurt. And quilting is supposed to be fun! So, perhaps something a little more random.

I searched through at all my favorite quilt blogs and flipped through all my books looking for inspiration, when I came across this quilt:
It's the "Party Stripes" pattern from the "Better Homes & Gardens: The Best of Weekend Quilts" book, which I bought on clearance for $3 back when I first started quilting. The pattern isn't exactly what I wanted, but certainly has the right flavor.

So I adapted it! The pattern makes a 54 1/2" x 75 1/2" quilt, and I wanted something more like 45"x60". It uses narrower strips of fabric than I wanted (1.5" or 2", whereas I wanted to work with 2.5" strips), and calls for a lot more fabrics and colors than I wanted to use. The construction method was perfect, though, so I did some sketching and some math and came up with my own version.

Here are some of the sets of strips going together:
And after a happily productive weekend, here is most of a quilt top! (It's actually still in three pieces, but I figure two seams left is close enough, at least for pictures.)
I'm at the stage I always seem to hit where I'm nearly done assembling the quilt top and am suddenly not in love with it any more. I'm pretty sure that I just need to finish it up, make a quilt sandwich, and decide on a fun quilting pattern, then I can fall in love with it all over again!

I was worried that the original selection of fabrics didn't have quite enough pinks in it, but pink is just not my favorite and I told myself it didn't need to be too girly. I do think the color balance would have been better with some more brights (including pink), but I'm thinking about using a variegated pink thread for the quilting, which should even things out nicely...right?

Anyway, it's fun to make something for an entirely new person, and work a little outside my comfort zone at the same time!
~Phosphorelated