Planning Ahead

Last year around Thanksgiving, I decided to make six quilts for Christmas gifts. While I did get them done, I decided this year I needed a head start to avoid any panic in December. I saw an example of an I Spy "story" quilt in the book The Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr. I thought it sounded like a fun idea for kids - either to have them hunt for a specific picture, or to do the story idea as described in the book. You pick a starting spot, and make up a story to tell by following the pictures along any path.

To make these quilts, you need a lot of pictures of objects, people, etc. Not the usual quilt fabric I tend to have on hand. I was able to get in a swap that requires each person to cut 20 4" squares from 10 fabrics, then send them to the coordinator who will send us each back 200 squares of different fabrics. Above are the fabrics I picked out today to send into the swap. It was fun picking these out, although rather difficult to limit myself to just these 10!

This is a picture of a section of the quilt shown in the book. It should be fun putting this together.

Before finding out about the I Spy swap, I went through my fabrics to cut out what I could - while I had quite a few, it wasn't nearly enough and didn't have enough different types of pictures. I apparently have a large number of bird fabrics . . . and of course tons of flowers. Some of these will probably end up in the quilts, a few probably not, but I figure I'll have these around as extras once I go through the ones from the swap, in case some of those don't quite fit. All in all, this was a lot of cutting for one evening!