Quilt-Mania

So my mom is in to quilting when she has the time. She made Jon and I a beautiful quilt as a wedding gift and then made a very cute one for Hadley girl. Recently, she was showing me a super cute quilt in one of her quilting magazines and I thought that'd be great for Hadley when she moves in to a "big girl" bed (we plan on just getting a twin sized mattress instead of wasting money on a toddler bed.) It's possible that when kid #2 comes along they will be sharing a room so I wanted to pick something that could also translate into a boy/girl room if needed. The quilt in the magazine had snails, flowers, and butterflies on it and I figured I could find some boy stuff in the future, again, if needed.

While the men were out hunting and grunting in the woods, we girls set out to find fabric for the quilt. It was hard to find anything as cute as what was in the magazine and that would have cost a pretty penny. I was getting discouraged when I found some quilt squares, pre-cut with an owl pattern on it. I was hoping they had the same patterns on bolts but they did not. I wracked (sp?) my brain and decided we'd go with a basic 'window pane' quilt (squares) and do an owl theme. Here are the two prints in the pack with owls on it, the others are just polk-a-dots and stripes and a flowery type pattern.

This presented a small problem...we'd have to come up with the design or layout, and dimensions of all the pieces on our own. The quilt squares were 10" x 10" so at least those were already set but we didn't want to use them all because some of the colors were more for a boy so we set those aside.

Below is our initial layout and we then spent about an hour or two figuring out the dimensions of the rest of the quilt.You may notice folded pieces of fabric in the layout. Those represent white squares which will have applique owls on it. This is not the entire quilt, just what would fit in the view of the camera, but it gives a good look at the beginning.

We decided to frame the the squares in a bright green and then another frame around that with white and finish with a pink, also making the backing a pink. It may seem hard to picture now but I'll continue to post pictures as the project goes. Here is one row already assembled (it will be 4 columns by 6 rows), the only one that will not have an owl in it.

So for the applique owls....we made our own owl pattern based off of the owl on the squares we bought.  We used heat n bond to adhere them to the plain white squares. They're a little stiff but as we put the batting and back fabric on it will be better.

The fabric we used to assemble the owls is from some of the squares that came in the pack (except for the beaks and the blue eyes).  Before we can assemble the owl squares I am doing a button-hole stitch around all the edges to help secure the fabric as it gets used and washed. Below is the first owl I've started the stitching on and I think it really makes the pieces kind of pop out. I only had time to do one eye and the beak before Hadley woke up so this is the next step for me to finish before assembling more rows. 

That's it for now! I'll continue to post pictures as we go, but I am so excited to see the final quilt, I think it's going to be sooooo cute.