Rainbow I-Spy Quilt

Do you ever see a quilt and just know that you have to make it?  That's what happened with the Rainbow I-Spy quilt from the Fussy Cutter's Club book!  I saw the picture and thought, "Hmm...I bet I could do that with my stash."  And as it turns out, I did (almost)!

I spent most of December and the first week of January just cutting out charms, systematically going through my entire stash to find the ones that I needed.  I cheated just a little bit, asking for some of the colors I was short on (purple and green) in my quilt guild's Secret Santa exchange.

Once I had all my charms cut out, I enlisted the help of my best randomizers: my kids!  They helped me sort the charms from darkest to lightest in each color group and we laid them out on the floor.  It turned out that two of the charms I'd cut didn't really play nice with the others and I was short a pink charm, but once I got over that hump all three of us were pretty excited.

Anyone who has an eagle eye may notice that two of the charms are not orientated the right way - unfortunately I didn't notice until they were already sewn in so I had to pick out the seams to fix them.  I'll blame the kids for that one.

Because I didn't want to worry about mixing up the charms and fixing mistakes (see above), I decided to web piece this one.  It's pretty small so it wasn't hard to maneuver the entire quilt around under my machine.  For anyone who hasn't done web piecing before, this means I sewed all the vertical seams together, first in pairs and then to each other, so everything was connected but unironed:

This way, there's no worrying about where anything goes because it's all locked into place.  Then I picked a row and ironed all the seams one way and ironed the seams in the row about the opposite way so they would nest.  I did pin all of the joins just so the checkerboard would have crisp corners and then I sewed them all together!  The ironing is a little tricky at first, but it goes really quickly once you get going.

After it was all sewn together, I did a simple meander in a light blue to match the backing fabric.  Since this is already a Rainbow iSpy quilt I didn't want the quilting competing with it!

I also knew I wanted to frame the quilt with a navy binding.  I auditioned two different fabrics but ended up going with the more solid one.

This was a really fun quilt to make - it was fun to search for all the charms and easy to sew it all together!  And the rainbow aspect of it gives it a little more punch.

We had fun styling it for the photoshoot too. The train is my husband's and the doll is mine - my great-grandma made her dress! We each had a dump truck just like this one, though this is one that we bought our kids. And my 5-year-old insisted that if I used his teddy bear I had to put the xylophone in too!

As is often the case with quilts that are just begging to be made for the sake of making them, I'm not 100% sure where this is going to end up.  My boys are too big for baby quilts, but all three of them have asked if we could keep it.  One even wants me to hang it up on the wall of their playroom so they can look at it.  I'd be flattered, but they want to keep all my quilts so this really isn't a surprise!

The Rainbow I-Spy quilt is the first finish off of my 2018 Quilt Goals list and was also my January Monthly Goal for the link-up at Elm Street Quilts.