Piecing It Together

Monday, May 25, 2009

Oh, right, I have this blog, too

It's been almost 2 years since I posted anything here, due entirely to lack of quilting time.


But my dear cousin, Michele, is expecting at the end of the summer. She's the other quilter in the family and between the two of us we carry on Grandma's tradition of making quilts for all high school graduates, newlyweds, and first-borns. When you have 35 cousins to cover, that's a lot of quilting. Given she's the one expecting a baby, I was tasked with making this particular quilt.


Michele is also the creative one who makes the embroidered animals for all of the baby quilts. Thankfully between the two I have photos of and the ones I've helped assemble I managed to figure out a few animals. Those took an hour or two each, but made for nice busy work during TV watching.

Then it was a matter of figuring out some sort of design that would allow me to fit in a few 6x6 squares for the animals. I landed on this for inspiration. After a particularly frustrating week at work I was sorely in need of a project that stayed done, and so this weekend I shut myself up in the basement for a few hours of therapy.One trick with working off of just a photo was first figuring out the pattern, then the sizing, and finally the most efficient way to put it all together. This one wasn't too hard to pick out the pattern: each color grid consisted of 4 blocks, and each of those was a large square, bordered with a rectangle 1/3 its width on either side and another square in the corner. But to make it fast, I took a little time to figure out the easiest way to do it with strips.
[Originally I only saw the photo from the inspiration quilt, not the site, so I had no idea what the pattern was called. I found the original site for the link in this post and read it, then googled "Disappearing nine-patch" and found a tutorial that would have been really really helpful. For anyone else considering it; look here.]

Here was the first step: joining the 6" blocks to a long 3" strip, then cutting those apart and ironing them. First step: Done.
Lots of strips and cutting, then joining to make the 9" blocks; joining those to make the 18" 4x4's, and I had these:
The spot where the four meet doesn't look all that pretty, so (based on my inspiration picture) I put a spacer piece between them and added more color blocks at the intersections. I also added a border to pull the design out a little more.

As it stood Sunday night:





The last step will be to add a colorful border. Since this is already way too huge for normal baby quilt standards, the border will be a little scaled down from the inspiration picture.

Then I just have to pick a backing, pencil on the quilt design, sandwich it, make the binding, and ship it all off to the family to present to her (un-quilted) at her shower in early June. It'll go in the frame to be quilted in the fall and hopefully she'll have it ready for the baby's room before the baby's first birthday.

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