Maggie's Quilt, Part I

A good friend of mine asked me to create a quilt for her daughter's move to her first big bed, an antique heirloom bed, around her 2nd birthday in November. I'm honored to be asked, and to have a quilt to make for someone so sweet makes it all the more fun. Several months ago the process began...

The request:

1. Double size quilt with a ruffle edge.
2. Cheerful fabrics in pinks, yellows, greens - no white background.
3. Coordinating pillow cover with ruffle.

The fabric:

Over email and Kaboodle (an awesome site for wish/shopping lists), we weighed several fabric collections like Moda's Simplicity, Tanya Whelan's Ava Rose and Heather Bailey's Freshcut. She chose Freshcut with pinks and greens after seeing this quilt and this one on flickr.

I ordered the fabric on ebay from epb dolls. I have nothing but good recommendations for this seller based on three orders I've placed. I also added in some left overs from my Freshcut quilt.

The pattern and piecing:

We chose the giant Carpenter's Wheel design, and I sketched it out on my graph paper. There are similar directions on Quilter's Cache, though you'd want to adjust the size of the blocks to match your dimensions. In my case, I wanted the main design to be 64" square, so I used 8" finished blocks (8.5" unfinished) for the Carpenter's Wheel. What helped the most was laying out the colors and blocks between each step of cutting, pinning and sewing rows together.

Isn't that lazy dog so helpful?

Then I added 8-12" of borders to make the entire quilt about 80"x84", plus the ruffle to be added at the end.

Here it is lying over my queen size bed.

I had orignally planned to piece the back with remaining fabric, but it fortuitiously turned out that I did not have enough. So, we decided on a large print peach and pink floral fabric to tie it all together.

In Part II, I'll cover the quilting and ruffle.