A New Quilting Project!

Remember this? My favorite quilt pattern of the quilting calendar giveaway? Well, I have started shopping for fabrics to make this quilt. The "hunt" is very much fun because I am looking for specific kinds of fabric that have pictures of recognizable objects, people, things that a child can play "I Spy" by finding these on the quilt. I originally wanted to make the quilt which is a finished size of 48 x 48 inches. Now I have decided to either make an "I Spy" big floor pillow or a doll quilt because I have only made about a half dozen or so quilts and they have all been baby quilts. I've never finished a big quilt although 48 x 48 is not really that big. My purpose in doing this is to practice all the skills of quilting but especially the machine quilting.

Here are some of the fabrics I found this week. I found out that some stores will cut as little as 1/16 yd. for you so some of these pieces are 1/16 yd, some 1/8, and some 1/4 yd. I will still have fabric leftover so I can save those for a bigger quilt. I think this quilt would be a great birthday gift for a child. This is not intended to be a "pretty" quilt and you don't have to worry about color coordinating and all that "stuff". You just need certain size squares and sort your fabrics by light, medium, and dark. I guess you really don't need to do that if you didn't want and could just put it together in a random manner. But I am going to try to make my center square with lights and my outer border with mediums and darks. Can you see the possibilities in the top photo? A spider, butterfly, dragonfly, ladybug, the Sesame Street characters of Baby Big Bird, Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, a frog, carrots, you get my drift! These colors will fall into my darks.

Here is an example of my mediums with the Pooh characters. The designer of the quilt calls for cutting 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch squares sewn to a 3 inch square but says you can use any size square or rectangle as long as it's divisible by 3. With these I could cut a 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inch rectangle or a 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 inch square since I would need more room to get the entire design in.

Here is one for my lights group with all kinds of animals and other things - giraffes, zebras, lions, a moon, palm tree on a polka dot border. But I will use each fabric character or object only once in the quilt.

Here are some possibilities to put either in the medium or light category. I love the little Hello Kitty, heart, baby block, duck, Care Bears and a little dog that looks a lot like Snoopy. Paige helped me choose these so that will make the little doll quilt or TV pillow special to her. She will remember helping me "buy" these. I think I only spent between $4 to $5 on all this fabric. I only bought fabric on sale racks. My next step is to look through all my fabrics I have here at home (including my charm packs), then plan how big I want the pillow or doll quilt to be and begin making my measurements and the plan before I start cutting. I don't have to use 3 inch blocks. I could use 2 inch block but make all my rectangles or bigger squares divisible by 2. So I have some planning to do first. After I finish the first one, I can group all these fabrics in one container for future quilts and go right to it. But I have to admit, the fabric shopping is the most fun!!!