Bloggers' Quilt Festival! Funhouse Quilt

It's Bloggers' Quilt Festival again!  I can't believe the time has passed so quickly since the last one.  My entry this time is my "Funhouse Quilt."

This quilt has an awesome history.  When I very first started quilting, my mother-in-law lent me a book called The It's Okay If You Sit On My Quilt Book (here is the updated version of the book I read).  In a nutshell, this book teaches you how to look at a block or quilt and figure out how it's constructed...and then do it easier.  So what did I do?  I found a really cool looking block that was in the book...and then did it harder!  I was messing around with EQ5 and drew it up and then found myself rotary cutting funky angles and sewing seven million set-in seams (without knowing they were set-in seams or that set-in seams were supposed to be hard).  This was also before I really grasped the concept of a 1/4" seam.  I just sewed with the fabric aligned with the edge of the presser-foot.  This wouldn't have been a problem at all...except for a few things.  The tedium of putting this baby together was getting to me, so I put it in a drawer and took a little break (read: 4 years).

Meanwhile, I got rid of the sewing machine I had been using and started using a different one.  Can you see where this is going?  Yes...when I got done, I had a bunch of different sizes of finished blocks...(because I'm not a perfect quilter, I didn't even have two different sizes, I had a range of sizes...some around 10.5 inches, some around 10.25 inches, some around 10.75 inches).  Yikes!  So I had to use the little trick I developed on this quilt, where I measured and then marked each side of each block with a colored pin according to its' dimensions (big, medium, or small) and then tried my best to match them up.  When it was all done, it made my eyes do weird things (lots of not-square squares and things mess with my head...kind of like a funhouse mirror)---and THAT is why it's called the Funhouse Quilt.

When I got it all done late last summer, I begged my amazing sister to quilt it for me.  Luckily, she took pity on my poor pregnant-and-nesting soul and quilted it for me.  I'm thrilled with what she came up with. The backing is dark blue minky and the quilting looks as good on the back as it does on the front.

 

 Swirls and flowers...SO cute!

A few weeks before my baby was due, I got a lovely package in the mail from my sister with this quilt (and a few others and some super-fun birthday surprises) inside.  I got to work and machine-sewed the binding on to quilt and then decided to hand-finish it.  I'll probably never get rid of this quilt because I worked on it while I was sort of in labor with my baby.  I say sort of because I woke up to pressure waves (contractions) and went out in to the living room to sit on my birth ball and zone out (I do Hypnobabies).  But NOTHING was happening, so I started sewing the binding.  I did that for a few hours, had a conversation with my husband about buying some equipment, then went back to bed. Later that day, we had our new addition.  Don't worry, between nursing the baby and wrangling the older kids it only took me two and a half more months to finish getting the binding all the way done.  To celebrate, we decided to go to the park and take some pictures!

Hope you're enjoying the quilt festival!!!