I Spy a Square Quilt

Here it is, my very last quilt of 2011! This is for a gorgeous little baby girl, our friends' daughter, which her mum asked to make a number of months ago. It was a bit difficult to get decent photos in the dark midwinter light but I did my best!

This was the sort of project I love - lots of scope to develop an idea and colours and I decided on a red, pink and aqua colour scheme as it has been my favourite all year! I also have lots of fabric in these colours in my stash so it was a natural choice.

I went with a "square within a square" type design (although one of the internal "squares" is a rectangle!) and it allowed me to use some teeny tiny precious fabric scraps I had been saving. Better again, a lot of the internal squares work as I Spy type squares as I fussy cut most of them, so there is lots of interest there for little E. I know that other quilts I have done with similar prints have been a real hit with my friends' babies and they love picking out the birds and animals, so hopefully E will too.

I found this a slow project to work on, for some reason it just did not come together as easily as most of my quilts do. I took a long time to piece the blocks and do the layout and also ran into some probs with my backing fabric, requiring me to take it off and redo. I won't bore you with the details, but a lot of unpicking was involved! But alls well that ends well and I think it was worth the time and effort.

I quilted it using a meandering stipple, but added loops and little hearts randomly throughout. I was really pleased with my little hearts  - it took a little practice to get used to doing them, but I just love the effect! I got the idea from Jessica's Double Wedding ring quilt and I'll definitely be experimenting with other little motifs for future projects.

The (second!) backing is a Jenean Morrison print from the California Dreamin' range.

And the binding is a cotton poplin with tiny pink and red apples - I've used this before as binding and the fact that its much lighter weight than quilting cotton makes it perfect for binding.

The finished size is approx 64" x 56" and sized for a toddler type bed, or to layer up over covers on a big girl bed. It's been washed and dried and is all ready to give to my friend who I will be meeting over the holiday period!

Quilt Stats:

Name: I Spy a Square quilt
Size: 64" x 56" approx
Fabric: Various Kona solids plus prints from my stash including the following lines- Bliss, It's Hoot, Just Wing It, Willow Wren, Ta Dot, All Star II, Penny Lane, Sherbet Pips, On a Whim 2 and more!
Quilting: Quilted by me on my home machine with a meandering stipple with loops and hearts
Batting: Warm and White
Pattern: My own design

If you've seen my sewing mojo anywhere...

Send it this way please! Seriously, I have barely sewn a thing in the last week and a half and worse still, I've been struggling a bit to work up the enthusiasm to do *anything* except sit in front of the fire at night watching Australian Masterchef, my new fave tv viewing and wishing I was out there in that sunshine. Not like me at all, and no reason for it either, seeing as I'm working on some great projects at the moment that I am totally in love with. I suppose life is getting in the way a little on the home front but hopefully with me having a week off work next week, I can catch up with myself and do some daylight sewing (and taking pics).

Anyway, feeling a bit sad I had no finishes to show you this week and no post since last Friday, I decided to just do a quick progress post.  This is for the quilt that is no 1 on my Winter Stitching list (by the way, I am blown away by how many people have linked up. The linky is open till Monday 31st so there's still time for people sitting on the fence about it. Not thinking of anyone in particular.... really....)

This is a quilt for our friends' daughter - its going to be bigger than a baby size quilt, more a toddler bed size quilt. I suggested a red pink and aqua palette to her mum and was really pleased she liked it - seeing how its my fave colour combo at the moment. And I have GREAT fabrics in these colours.

I drew up a rough sketch but only sat down to work out the details last week of the cutting requirements. Then I did some trial blocks. Its pretty much a square within a square design. There are 3 different blocks, with 3 different sizes of central square (or rectangle for one of them). I was really pleased with these blocks and happy this will work.

 

 These blocks will work in lots of different ways and can be turned around to change the placement of the centre block to really add interest to the design.

I did not give much thought to the cutting that would be required. The acres and acres of cutting. Silly me.

This quilt will have 56 blocks at 8" square cut, 7.5" square finished. Each square needs 5 pieces. That is 280 pieces to cut for the quilt front. Now those of you who know me know I like to take shortcuts. I cut all my fabric for the ATS quiltalong in about half an hour flat - I normally cut lots of layers together. But the square centres really cry out for fussy cutting and the other pieces are all different sizes so its not really that straightforward. I cut for about 2 hours today and got about 2/3 of my centre pieces cut and a small number of the surrounding strip pieces for the blocks. I really love the fabrics and I'm hoping they sew up as well as they look when they are cut!

But the bad news - there's still a pile of fabric waiting to be cut! Oh well, just writing this has made me look forward to it ;-)

 Bring on Tuesday morning when I will be shooing the kids off to play a game, or even watch a dvd (yes, bad mammy moment in planning) and get the rest of these in some kind of order! I won't get to do my FMQ post this week for Cindy's practicealong unless I manage to squeeze an extra hour into tomorrow, which is unlikely. But I will link up next week on the double! And hopefully, by then one of you will have figured out how I can recover my sewing mojo and crank up the productivity again!

PS - there is another giveaway running over on the Sew Irish Facebook page for the last pair of tickets to the Dublin Knitting and Stitching show for Irish peeps - pop over and leave a comment on the giveaway post to enter.