I loved this! So I checked out what other bits of fabric this seller had and discovered a treasure trove of bonkers animals wearing human clothes!
There were eleven of these animals in total so I designed a quilt where the central panels would be made up of the eleven animals, and Shannon advised on the colour scheme for the main blocks of colour - of supposedly red and grey, but, once purchased, looked more pink and beige! Hey ho, you can't win them all!
This was the original hand drawn design which I soon set up on an excel spreadsheet - I bloody love Excel!
Colours too!
We lost all our power at work one day so couldn't do any work - shame. So, instead, I had printed this sheet off in advance which had the measurements on, so I cut out my templates for the main blocks using some old yellow card I found in the stationery cupboard.
I took the size of the biggest animal panel as my basis for the (nearly) squares - the animal fabric was so very thin that I needed to back it so I bought another contrasting colour fabric - aqua - to sew the animals to, so they were thick enough to work with. The boxer dog was slightly smaller than the other animals, so his square is the only one with the aqua fabric showing - shame really, but there was nothing much I could do about it. I did stick him in the middle though so there was some symmetry going on!
I started off by sewing stripes of the design - so I had big long strips of fabric to work with. As each strip was done, I needed to press open the seams and then use my ironing board to pin the below strip to the one above.
This is a strange photo - freshly sewn and pressed strips on the ironing board and Finn laying in the background - perspective all a bit skewed in this!
The ironing board was up for days! (Not that I used it for any other ironing of course!)
This was in it its roughest form - with no wadding or backing fabric. The wadding was lovely and thin and came from Taverham craft centre. The backing fabric was sourced for me by Mo from Knitters with Attitude - and in fact we spent one of our meetings (when Amanda, the eventual recipient, didn't attend) checking out "stitching in the ditch" on Mo's internet!
All that was left then was to find some contrast bias binding and edge the quilt.
This was the most painful job of all as I had to pin through four layers of fabric and one layer of wadding - my fingers were shredded to bits.
Still, it was completely worth it and I'm thrilled with the end result. So thrilled and excited in fact, that I totally forgot to take any photos of the completed article! (I'm hoping if Amanda reads this that she might send me some photos so I can edit this post. Hint, hint ...)
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