Blogger's Quilt Festival...Little Bookworms

Thanks everyone for checking out yesterday's entry into the Blogger's Quilt Festival ROYGBIV category - the quilts already entered are amazing and I love finding new blogs (new to me anyways) with such talent!  I had a hard time narrowing down which category to put each quilt in, but finally decided that today's entry would be submitted for the Scrap category:

Little Bookworms

50" x 50"

Pieced and quilted on my home machine with Guterman thread in a rainbow of colors

Category: Scrap Quilts

One of the things that I'm happy I've passed onto my girls is a huge love of books.  I've always got a book (or two...plus maybe an audiobook in the car) queued up on my Nook or out from the library.  Big sister learned to read pretty early and I'm convinced that part of that is because we always set aside time to read together each day.  So what better gift for both of them than a quilt that captures their favorite books and characters all together?

I had seen a quilt from Ashley at Film in the Fridge called Converging Corners - very scrappy and lots of negative space.  I liked it but I'm not usually one for uber-scrappy quilts.  I do however love me a rainbow quilt.  When I got to thinking about designing a book-themed quilt, I thought that illustrations from each book would be a cute center for the Converging Corners blocks.  But instead of going completely scrappy, I could lay it out so that each corner has a specific color.  Then each of those converging corners would join to create a scrappy colored star.

To make each of the blocks, I took digital pictures from the books that I found online (or in one case where I couldn't find anything, scanned an illustration straight from the book) and printed them out through my inkjet printer on printable fabric.  I followed the instructions for pressing so that it became colorfast, then sewed away!  The texture of the fabric is slightly stiffer than regular cotton, but I'm dealing with smaller squares framed in regular quilting cotton so its not an issue.  All of my character squares are slightly different sizes, but I added my white fabric on all four sides as a border and then trim down to 8.5".  Then it's off to the colorful converging corners! After all of the layers of white and color, each block ended up being trimmed down to 12.25" 

Here's the complete list of block sources just in case you don't recognize the characters:

Top row (left to right):  The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, Olivia by Ian Falconer, Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney, I Had a Favorite Dress by Boni Ashburn
2nd row: I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, Pinkalicious by Victoria & Elizabeth Kann, Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
3rd row: Put Me In the Zoo by Robert Lopshire, Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
Bottom row:  Go Dog Go! by P.D. Eastman, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maisy's Bedtime by Lucy Cousins

All I did to quilt the Bookworms was to outline each character square once and then quilt the colored stars using Angela Walter's suggestions for irregular shapes - it's really hard to see in pictures (and even in person) because I matched the thread to the dominant color, but you can kind of see the arcing petals in these pictures:

The binding came out quite nice - the black and white french phrases are not really noticeable on the front of the quilt, but you definitely notice it on the back side.

I am so in love with this quilt for my girls and I'm so happy to report that the girls seem to love it just as much!  My littlest loves to sit and look at each block, pointing out her favorites.  They haven't quite noticed the detailed label on the back, but it still makes me melt a little bit.

I can't wait to see all the entries submitted throughout the week, vote for some favorites and pick up some inspiration!