'11 Super Duper Dance Party Rave of Joy # 26: Pantry Quilt

It's done!  It's done!  It's finally done!  My first official real life quilty quilt of hugeness.  And huge it is.  I had intended it to be twin size, but it had a mind of its own and became a full size quilt.

The design is called a jar quilt.  Each jar and piece of the border fabric are different.   The quilt is for Blockette and I've titled it "Wizard's Pantry."  Each jar is something that I thought you might find if you were to take a peek in the pantry of a wizard.

For example, the above jars contain: mermaids, slime, snowflakes, fairies and butterflies, peas (hey a wizard needs to eat his greens too), a fairy, lightning, and coins.

I started this quilt last year once Blockette had started Kindergarten.  I worked on it for a 30 minutes to an hour each day she was at school. I finished all the cutting and piecing work, then took a break for the summer.

Once school started up again, I pinned and machine quilted it.  I think I spent more time trying to decide how to quilt the darn thing, than I did actually quilting it.  I had to revise my plan several times because my machine quilting skills are not very good yet.  I still need lots and lots of practice before I can attempt the more precise and fancy designs.

I settled on outlining the jars and doing a squiggly sort of stipple on the border.  Sometimes it was completely random, and others I went around the design of the border fabric.

I wanted to do something slightly different on the white blocks in the corners. It is supposed to be an abstract sort of palm leaf. Yeah. I know. Remember, I said it was abstract, so use your imagination.

Once I had the top pieced, I realized that I hadn't planed on a fabric for the back.  I was out of crafting funds at the time, so I needed to use the fabric already in my stash.  I found this wonderful Geisha fabric that I had no immediate plans for and thought it would be perfect.  Perfect, except for the fact that there wasn't enough fabric to back the entire quilt.

So I had to get creative and piece the back with other fabrics in my stash. The back turned out like this:

Not too bad for winging it.  There was only one problem.  I have no idea how it happened, but the black fabric on the bottom border ended up really wide in parts.  I thought I had squared everything of all hunky dory, but I guess not.  That's just character. And it makes the quilt really identifiable should anyone dare to swipe it.

Since I made this entirely while Blockette was at school, she has no idea that I've made her a quilt.  I haven't given it to her yet.  I'm debating whether or not to save it for a Christmas present.  I guess that is going to depend on how cold it gets in November, or if she decides to go in my craft room.  I mean it's just sitting out there.  The label is face up and has her name on it, so I guess it's going to depend more on if I can find a place to hide it before she goes in there.