Blogger's Quilt Festival

Thanks so much for joining me from Amy's Bloggers' Quilt Festival 2011.

Here are the latest two quilts I've completed.  I Spy quilts for my sons.

I have two sons.  Wyatt is 4 and Owen is 3.  I have never been a fan of I Spy quilts, but when my sister-in-law showed us the one she made for her son, my kids went nuts over it, searching for each object with a surprising amount of enthusiasm.  I decided then and there that I needed to make my boys their own I Spy quilts, but I also needed to find a design that was more my style.

So I signed up for a couple online swaps for charm squares.  Both swaps were for 4 inch charms.  The first swap got me 200 I Spy squares, but most of the prints were really busy looking.  I put them on a shelf, waiting for inspiration to strike...  Then a color wheel swap started up and I jumped at the chance to add 200 more squares to my stash.  These squares were really nice because most of them were calmer prints or solids.  I sorted all 400 charm squares into piles by color & started making 16 patches.  It didn't take long to come up with the rest of my plan.  A rainbow aesthetic was sure to draw my kids' eyes.  I supplemented some from my stash and a couple friends helped me out with oranges and purples, which I seemed to be short on.

Assembling the blocks went really quickly.  I sandwiched the quilts right before I went on a weekend retreat & got 1 1/2 quilted while I was gone.  I used two different quilting techniques.  The first one was quilted with my walking foot in straight lines.  However, I felt like the quilt was really creeping with me, despite pinning in every other square.  This caused me to try something different in the second quilt.  I used my free motion foot and quilted really densely in a sort of flame/paisley pattern and I changed thread color in each section.  I love the look and feel of that type of quilting and I'll certainly do it again soon.  Using quilting gloves helped me keep a little more control over my progress.   I didn't pre-mark and of my quilting lines.  I just had some wine and got busy.

These will be Christmas gifts for my two boys.  I envision the quilts being used in our living room while watching TV, in the kitchen to make tents or in the back yard for impromptu picnics.

Thanks so much for stopping by!  I hope you'll subscribe & want to learn more about me.  You can find more of my work and my taste here on my blog, on my Flickr photostream, on my twitter profile, in my Etsy shop or on my Pinterest boards.