My number one granddaughter turned five this month, and I made her a special quilt!
I had a couple of bright but smaller charm packs on hand, ones purchased at Wal-Mart. They were cheap, partly because of fabric quality and party because they were half the amount of regular charm packs.
For last Christmas, Isabella gave me a fabric roll of 2.5″ strips, also from Wal-Mart. They weren’t the exact same prints as the charm packs I had, but they co-ordinated well enough.
One day when Izzy was over for a visit, I asked her to match up a strip and a square, to put together ones she thought looked nice.
Some of them were crazy indeed! Once I started piecing the blocks I had to match up more and also add some more strips from my stash. But there are a good number of blocks that Isabella can look at and say, “I did that!”
I got the blocks pieced over most of one day. Over a couple other days, I picked the backing fabrics -two vintage small floral prints – and prepped the binding, one of the extra fabrics I pulled from my stash.
I also decided, since she likes heavy warm quilts, to use two layers of batting. I have a lot of battings scraps built up, so I pieced two layers. One layer is my 50/50 warm and natural, the other layer is Hobbs cotton, possibly with some 80/20 blends in there too. I didn’t get a picture of the battings I pieced, but it made a nice dent in the stash, and for a kid quilt will be fine.
Basting went pretty fast, maybe only 20 minutes total. I quilted it on my Bernina 440 QE, with a meandering loop-de-loop pattern. It perfectly fits the bright spirit of the quilt and Izzy’s personality.
I even remembered to label it this time.
Two more shots of the full quilt.
Birthday girl opened it up and said “Awwww! I LOVE IT!” and cuddled it lots.
Awesome! Something she will keep forever and have such good memories every time she looks at it!