I Spy..... A New Quilt!

Six whole days and evenings it took me to make this 50" square quilt... Yikes, I'm soooo slow. My neighbor raised her eyebrows in doubt when I told her how long it took, thinking she probably could have done it in 2 days.

Perfectionism is the square root of the time. Ha! Oh well, at least I'm satisfied with it.

The backstory... This quilt, I Spy a Brown Dog, is for my Goddaughter's two children, primarily for her daughter, who is just a year old now, but also for her son, who is about 5, I think. They live in Copenhagen. The above block (photographed before I sewed the left and bottom borders on it), is at the center of the quilt because the whole family loves dogs. Had I been making it for myself (the child within) the center block would have been birds, flowers, kitties, or bunnies... all of which I adored, and all of which found their way into this quilt.

In case you don't know, an "I Spy" quilt allows adults to play a game with children, saying things like "I spy an orange elephant." Then the child finds and points to the orange elephant on the quilt. My Goddaughter's family is multilingual, so it can also be used to teach vocabulary in a second or third language to the kids when they are very young, in a fun way.

Besides selecting all the fabrics and fussy-cutting the blocks, the most difficult part was arranging the finished blocks. No matter what I did, the yellows seemed to be bunched up together.  Finally I took a photo of one of the arrangements, changed the mode to black & white, and printed it.

This showed me that I had more lights than I thought, and gave me the idea to put the yellow bordered blocks in the corners and in a left to right diagonal. Once I did that, the rest fell easily into place! Here's the photo again, so you can see what I mean...

The back also took extra time, because I didn't have any suitable fabric large enough to do the whole back. So, since it had to be pieced anyway, I figured it might as well have another dog block, and a mix of fabrics. Here it is.

I scanned two of the fabric prints to make a dedication label, and printed it on ink-jet-printable fabric. Here it is.

The last part was quilting it, something I've got very little experience doing by machine (and way too much experience doing by hand). You can see the quilting pattern, if you click on the picture of the back to enlarge it.

There y'go... kept me out of trouble for 6 whole days! Hope they like it.