Another finish! This one for Greta

  Crayon Scribbles

I'm so happy to have another quilt finished and off to its new owner.  This is a quilt that I started making for my granddaughter, Greta, even before she was born -- May 20, 2014.  What with the broken legs incident and the hassles of selling one house and buying another, that's pretty good, I think.  I have plenty of UFOs way older than that!

  Unfortunately, it seems that I neglected to take a photo of the completed quilt top.  And then so much time passed before I got it quilted that I forgot had hadn't taken pics!  Arrgh!

This was from when the blocks were on my "design wall" (the bedroom curtains).

You might remember that I used a disappearing wheel block from a Missouri Star Quilt Co. tutorial (http://aquilterspath.blogspot.com/2015/03/for-greta-from-jenny-doan.html).




I changed up the colors and added sashing to make the blocks stand out more.



The blocks remind me of those fat, flat-sided crayons that they make for toddlers.  So I decided that the name of the quilt would have something to do with crayons.


Then the quilt top sat, and sat, and sat.  With Greta's second (!) birthday looming, it was time to get back to work!







After stitching in the ditch to secure the quilt sandwich, I quilted parallel lines around each "crayon."
One more row of stitching to anchor the interior white rectangles.

The sashing turned out to be too wide (in my opinion), and there is just SO MUCH WHITE.  (But, as my son said, "not for long!").  Well, what would a toddler do with an expanse of white and a box of crayons?  Yep, she'd scribble all over it.  So that's what I did on the sashing.

I just zigged and zagged down the sashing in variegated thread.  Curvy lines would have looked better, more scribble-y, but I hadn't done any free-motion quilting in a while, and I didn't think it would turn out very well.  This was OK, and it helped to break up all the white.

With all those pretty colors on the top, what would I use for binding?  I still had some 10" squares from the original layer cake package.  I cut them into strips and made a pieced binding.  I really like how it turned out!

I also know that this puppy can stand up to washing.  I hadn't prewashed the layer cake, and when the quilt was washed, of course ONE RED fabric bled.  And bled.  It took four washes with ten Color Catchers to get rid of the excess dye.





Of course, since I'd forgotten to photograph the front of the quilt, I didn't have pics of the back, either.  It's flannel with a whimsical farm theme.  Sheep, cows, a puppy, and some (upside-down) chickens at the bottom.

I'd make this quilt again, but I would make it smaller.  The idea was for Greta to have a playing and crawling surface that could be washed.  But she was out of the crawling phase before I could turn around!  Maybe it will make a nice cover for her first Big Girl bed.