my first quilt

2 years ago [god i'm a bad mom]- when orange was her favorite color [we've since moved onto pink, purple, and my favorite "all the colors"] i had the little pick out some fabric. she chose the above cloud nine - and held it all the way home. 

i told her i would make her something. what did she want? a skirt? a dress? a bag? mama, i want a blanket. 

gulp. 

i made a quilt with my mom, once, as a pre-teen? quilt? oh boy. but you can't say no to that kind of request. so i told her she'd have to be patient, and she was... [i remind you TWO YEARS!]. 

i thought it'd be really fun to make squares and enlarge the funny monster characters - and the white circles/ovals they lived on. there were 6 characters. so that made it easy. i'd make six squares and use the fabric as the backing. i only bought 2 yards of fabric, so it was going to have to be slightly smaller than a twin in size, but that seemed fine [and made my task easier].

initially i was going to quilt the circles INTO the orange background, but i quickly realized that was beyond my skillset, so i appliqued them instead [machine zig zag stitch]. i also arranged the circles/characters in slightly different positions. once the embroidery was complete i started laying out the squares to see compositionally what worked. 

because it was my first quilt, i didn't want to do any CRAZY quilting. so concentric rectangles it was. i just measured them out. 

i used orange gingham i had in my stash for the binding [JEEZ i found the binding part REALLY HARD!!]. i machine stitched everything. 1 - because it's faster and 2 - because i figured this blanket would probably get washed a lot, and potentially dragged around and i didn't want to have to repair hand stitching repeatedly. 

i want to give a HUGE shout out to erin - if it wasn't for her book i would have had no idea how to sandwich correctly or how to even begin to tackle binding. i wrote about her book here... and it really is such an amazing resource. 

i also now see why people get into this whole quilting thing. i really do. [but i doubt i'll ever be a master]