Foxy

When Lizzy House's Outfoxed line came out last fall, I thought it looked fun, but I was trying to reduce fabric purchases until I got the stash under control. A few months later, when I found out my first quilty-blogland friend Michelle was pregnant with Kit, I had a good reason to buy a yard of Outfoxed. More specifically, I grabbed a yard of those clever foxes in the Outwitted (yellow/green) colorway, so I could make a gender-neutral quilt for the as-yet-to-be-gendered-or-named baby-fox-to-be.

That was the plan anyways. Despite my winter acquisition of a piece of fabric, Kit debuted with no quilt on hand, or even in my head. I had some vague ideas based on Michelle's flickr favorites (because, let's be honest, she's going to appreciate the quilt more than her child, at least for a while), but nothing really stuck. To an extent reasonable (it's true, sometimes I make up new phrases), I wanted to combine our styles. Which can be a little tricky, like a fox.

Michelle is a paper-piecing rock star, so that seemed like a good place to begin. And I'd seen these 8-pointed stars around blogland for a while; I'd even printed out the templates. Actually, I printed them twice, as my July self did not recall that my April self had already printed them. Now I can make another, I suppose. I love the outcome, but that star took several hours of an evening to master, so I applaud anyone who makes lots of them. After that evening, I knew this quilt would feature one star and one star only.

Which is where my love of asymmetry, pops of color, and negative space comes in. Because one star can make a very fine modern quilt. The purple was a last-minute addition, when the yellow/green/black/white combo seemed to lack a little pizzazz. And goodness knows, infants need pizzazz in their vision fields.

I happened to be perusing the shelves at Brenda's shop while contemplating the back. I only had a yard of Outfoxed, and the quilt grew to be a bit larger. I saw Aneela Hoey's Foxlets print and it obviously needed to join the other foxes on parade, or around the campfire.

The binding followed the design of the quilt front: mostly black, with a teal corner. Deciding what thread to use to machine-bind it posed a bit of a quandary, but in the end I opted for black. It stands out on the teal portion but disappears into black fabric. Aside from the fox fabrics, everything else came from my stash, so even Foxy, as I began to refer to it while sewing it together, contributed to stash reduction.