Thank Goodness it's Finished, Friday Party!



A warm welcome to you from
our garden gnome Grier



Welcome! After a long week (and boy this one felt looooonng), it's nice to take some time to enjoy what we've accomplished. I'm so thrilled you are here!

As I mentioned in my Works in Progress posts, my two older boys and I were working on some twin-sized (+) Bottled Rainbow quilts for their beds. I needed a summer project that would keep them quiet for an hour or two in the afternoons when their little brother napped and they needed quilts for their beds in the summer. They share a bunk bed so I was pretty happy that their quilts would look similar, but not the same.

Daniel's quilt, called Daniel Spies a Bottled Rainbow, is the first one done so that's the one I'm sharing today. A lot of the mosaics have fussy-cut novelty prints, which gives the quilt a bit of an I-Spy feel, hence the combination name. And because I'm oh-so-creative with names, Patrick's quilt will be called Patrick Spies a Bottled Rainbow. ;) The finished size is 65" by 82.5" - an extra wide twin quilt.

Daniel Spies a Bottled Rainbow - Front



Back



Happy boy!

I made a number of adaptations to Rachel's wonderful Bottled Rainbow design so that it would work for us as a project I could do with the kids. If you are not familiar with how her Bottled Rainbow quilt is made, then what I say may not make sense. Sorry! I'm just trying to be brief about this.

• I made the blocks 17" by 21" figuring that I'd have to trim them down to get them to be all the same size. I ended up trimming them to 16.5" by 20.5", giving a finished size of 16" by 20".
• I used the blocks vertically instead of horizontally.
• I made all of the base blocks first (white centre with coloured border, white centre stitched-in-the-ditch attached to the batting).
• We did the mosaics of one block a day. The boys got to pick which one we worked on each day (same colour for both boys).  
• The boys and I had a ball sorting through my scraps to match them to the blocks.
• Two things I learned after doing the first couple of mosaics: 1) Try to make the pieces big so they take up a lot of room and so it is quicker to zig zag stitch down, and 2) Minimize how curvy or intricate the scraps are so that it is quicker to zig zag stitch the scraps. (It took me 30-40 minutes to zig zag stitch some of those blocks. Oy!)
• Once all the mosaics were done, I had the boys pick the backing for each block so I could make this a quilt-as-you-go project. I had hoped that the back would also look like a Bottled Rainbow, but that didn't really work out as often the dominant colour of the backing they chose was not the colour of the front of the block.
• For the quilting, I first stitched in the ditch around the white centre. I chose a different freemotion quilting motif for each border of the block. I also made sure that the quilting motifs for the blocks on both boys' quilts were different (ie. Daniel has stars on his yellow block, Patrick has circles). The one exception was the red block. They both got hearts on that one 'cause Mama looooooves them so much. :) 
• The fabulous sash and binding stripe is Celebrate Seuss by Robert Kauffman. Love, love, love!
• I took a bunch of photos when I was doing the sashing so I can do a tutorial on the quilt-as-you-go technique next week. I'd do it here, but this post is already too long. And really, y'all want to see other finishes, right?