Dinosaurs Quilt

Because I work with yarn all day, quilting has become a big creative outlet, especially when I get a chance to make a gift for someone.

For the newest nibling to join my family, I made them a quilt using the Dinosaurs pattern by Elizabeth Hartman, going with the small size (48 x 48).

To make the dinosaurs, I used a mix of deep stash fabrics from 2014 and 2015, most of which are Alison Glass fabrics, but I'm sure a few others got mixed in there. I wanted to stick with fabric from my stash as much as possible, and I picked colors and patterns that I thought would work well together.

The background brown is Kona cotton in the color biscuit, though for that I didn't have quite enough in my stash and had to pick some up.

When I make a quilt, I usually cut all of my fabric before sewing, but this one was such an undertaking I decided to work in sections.

First I broke down all of the fabric for each dino into larger pieces as directed in the pattern and put them in file folders (one per dino).

Then I worked on each block type separately. I started with the plants, cutting the larger pieces I had already sorted out into the correct sizes. And then I worked dino by dino, building one at a time and stored them in their file folders until it was time to attach everything.

Here are the Stegosaurus pieces all prepped, labeled, and ready for sewing.

That's the part of quilting I find so enjoyable -- cutting out puzzle pieces and then sewing those pieces together. So fun! Quilting has also filled my creative needs in many ways, from being as meditative as garter stitch (sewing random scraps together) to being as complicated as a lace shawl (making blocks with 1" pieces).

To make the back of the quilt, I took scraps I had saved from cutting up the dino pieces and sewed those into bigger blocks. Then I used whatever I had hanging around to fill out the rest. I sewed the scraps in between each section of building a block, basically creating several bonus blocks at the end.

Here is the backing in progress, being measured by Hose Cat. He said it's not big enough (the tape on the floor shows how big the quilt top is).

For the binding I used any dinosaur and plant scraps still around that I could cut into 2.5” strips. When putting the binding on, I was very proud of myself for catching all of the back of the binding while using the machine to attach it. When adding binding, I usually miss a few spots and have to go back through to fix it, but not this time!

Over time I've also gotten much better at making mitered corners, and also now that I have a machine with a walking foot, I enjoy top quilting way more than before.

While I'm not super thrilled by some parts of the final quilt, that's only because I would have made some different choices if I wasn't trying to use only stash fabric. I'm overall proud of this quilt, and my nibling has already been using it to stay warm.