Project Quilting - Challenge 6 - Flower Power Dolly Blanket

This weeks challenge for Project Quilting was to find inspiration in an office supply store. I could come up with nothing until Kim told me to go to the store and wander around. Which I did and inspiration struck. We were to use 3 supplies for inspiration. Here's what I came up with. (Scary dolly for display purpose only)

The inspiration for my dolly blanket was all the bright colors of the new school supplies, a folder (pictured below), white poster board, and a quilted backpack.

I started with 2 pieces of cotton fabric I had gotten a while back at Walmart. They are supposed to be big dish towels, but I loved the texture and knew I could do something with them someday. They came in a big package of 5. After ironing them out, they looked and were about the size of white poster board.

I cut one piece in half, sandwiched it with some batting and quilted it. I quilted in a diagonal manner like the way the backpack I saw was quilted. I really like how it looks as I usually stipple everything.

I then heat bonded a bunch of solid colored fabrics, traced out my flowers, cut them out and ironed them onto my quilted surface. The butterfly wasn't on the inspiration folder, but I thought it would blend in nicely. I then free-handed the remaining flowers that were going to be just stitched.

After adhering all the flowers I matched thread and sewed over the flowers. I stitched several times around not going over the same line of stitching as I wanted it to look like doodling.

As I was finishing all the doodling, my machine decided she had had enough and I spent about an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. Which was aproximatly 57 minutes to many. So, before taking a sledge hammer to her or putting my head thru the nearest wall, I got out my baby Janome (which is like a kids sewing machine) and sewed on the ribbon border. I wanted it to be nicely couched onto the quilt but my janome only does a simple zig-zag. Whatever.

This piece measures 22 x 16 and was fitfully made in water-logged Elgin, IL.

Head over to Flicker to check out the other pieces....especially Aunt Kathleen's. I'm thinking she will be the judges winner this week!