My Favorite Things

Dear Readers,

When I walk, at a time when they are home, my two little neighbors walk with me.  Well, at the beginning of the summer, MC, the older child started asking me about helping her to make a quilt.  I put her off as I was working on the elephant quilt, and I thought she may not be ready.  After I got home from my trip to Georgia, she was still asking.  So I told her to let me think about it and see what I could come up with.  So I cleaned my studio and put out my featherweight for MC to sew on.  I thought she might like to do a disappearing 9 patch pattern.  It has all straight seams and I like the way you get a cool pattern that appears when you cut it apart and put it back together.  My plan was to have her sew the nine patches and I would do the ironing and cutting.  So I put tape on the machine so that she could use that to line up the fabric.  It did not go well...she struggled with keeping it lined up.  

 I ended up having her use my scraps to  practice with and then after she left, I finished putting the 9 patches together.

Later in the year, I put the 9 patches together as a quilt, adding a few more to the mix to make it the size of a small throw.

I decided to call it my favorite things as I know MC loves pretty colors.  So then I quilted the white background and the borders.  The borders I had used fabric with a dragonfly pattern.  So I was just outlining the dragonfly and making swirls on the border.  Because I was using a different kind of thread, I guess I wasn't handling it right, as the machine kept shredding it.  Eventually I got the border done and the white areas.

After I did that, I was looking at it and decided the colored blocks needed quilting too.  So I free motioned a different animal or something I knew she liked on each block.

Since I was working on it at night after school, a lot of the time, I messed up and did some of the quilting sideways.

I had a piece of a horse print in my stash, and I know that MC loves horses so I put it on the back.
It wasn't great looking but MC loved it.

Also busted the stash on using up some greens that kind of coordinated on the back, AND a piece of orange flannel for the binding.  Whoop, whoop!!

Still, despite all the issues, overall I really like the way this came out.  Finished size is 51 x 57.

Sew on,

Terry