Blogger's Quilt Festival Entry

The lovely Amy at Amy's Creative Side is hosting the annual Blogger's Quilt Festival.  This is an opportunity for quilters from around the world, old, new, beginners, experienced, to enter a quilt they've made. 

Although the quilts aren't judged, there is an opportunity to win quilty goodies for all those who enter!

I've decided to enter my Eye Spy quilt......

.....with the homemade rainbow binding:

I've seen many different types of Eye Spy (or charm) quilts over the years, but not so much in this new age of contemporary quilting. 

I love the concept of 'Eye Spy' quilts for children (& adults!). I have this dreamy fantasy of sitting with a little one on my knee, playing 'eye spy' while finding the different pictures in the quilt lovingly draped over the 2 of us!

This activity also indulges my love of recycling fabrics & giving them a new purpose. Over the past 12-18 months I've been hoarding collecting little pieces of fabric that have pictures on them.  This can become quite addictive as you start to see pictures that you could use everywhere (other people's clothes, curtains, etc.!). 

When I thought I had enough fabrics collected, I set about fussy cutting them - larger pics lent themselves to a 4" square while smaller motifs were cut as a 3" square.

It took a wee bit of canny calculating to work out how to fit borders made up of 3" squares around a the 4" squared centres, but I got there in the end (amazingly!).

I had a wee bit of bother quilting this baby (blogged about here), so after outline quilting the larger squares, I ended up doing more outline quilting and in the ditch quilting for the border.  Not very exciting but I'm still pleased with the end result.

I came up with the idea of rainbow binding because I didn't want solid or patterned binding, and I think the rainbow colours keep this quilt fun & child-friendly.  You can find a tutorial on how to make rainbow binding on my blog.
This quilt is only 37" x 37" but there was a huge amount of fun & joy that went into it, and I hope much enjoyment from it in the years to come.