Okay, I'll admit it - I slightly overbooked myself for Christmas this year, but I finally finished the last "has to be done" quilt today. This is one my niece and I made together (her first) for her little girl's first big-girl bed.
Our first challenge was come up with a design. She didn't really want to make a traditional block quilt, and we wanted to make it fairly simple and not too time consuming. Once the design was determined, we had to find fabric that matched the paint color in the room that was to become Ms. P's bedroom. It was a blue-gray color and perfect for it's former purpose as an office, but not so much for a little girl's room. But, she didn't want to repaint, so ... off to the LQS, where we chose seven blue-gray fabrics to create the background.
To keep it on the feminine side, she chose pink and purple for the accent colors. At this point, I wasn't too sure how this was going to turn out, but I thought Fairy Frost would help with the "feminization." Connie at the LQS special ordered the colors we wanted, and we were in business.
My niece sewed all the background squares together as well as doing all the applique (except for the ballerina slippers). About the time that was done, she announced that instead of getting a twin-size bed, they had decided to get a full-size. Thankfully we hadn't started the quilting yet, so we were able to adjust by inserting a strip of each of the two accent colors and adding borders. In the meantime, we started a search for the backing and came up with this:
Well, that was a long story and probably more than you wanted to know. If you'd like to take a look at a couple of the pictures, they're the first two in my 2010 Quilts album on Webshots. This link should take you to them: