Project Quilting 16.6: Button It Up!

It's hard to believe that another season of Project Quilting is over!  I focused mainly on small projects this time around, and had fun trying out different ideas in a small scale.  This week, as always, I veered a little bit off-track in the final challenge, Button It Up.

The big red center is an actual button that you can press (aka a squeaker like what is in a dog toy)!

I debated a long time on how to insert my squeaker, but finally decided to fully enclose it.  I put a piece of fusible fleece interfacing behind the red X block to make that fabric a little sturdier, then put the squeaker behind the X and pinned a square of interfacing the size of the whole center behind it.  I stitched in the ditch around the edges of the red hexagon to hold it all together, then layered and basted my quilt as normal.

I was worried the the bubble would make things wonky, but it actually quilted up just fine.  I started in the center and worked my way outwards and aside from the planned bump in the middle it lies flat.  The entire dark gray center has that extra batting underneath it, so it does slope gradually down.  You can tell that there's more heft there when you touch it, but it's not visible from a distance.  I had a lot of fun quilting different patterns in each of the rounds and I think I've convinced myself I need to orange peel my leaders and enders quilt when I finally get around to finishing that up (just needs some borders and it is ready to go!).

Before my youngest was in school, he got to pick out a fat quarter every time we went to the fabric shop, which resulted in some fabric that I probably never would have picked for myself.  This button fabric is one such example and has been sitting around in my sewing room for a long time just waiting for me to make this project.  I didn't have quite enough, so I added a little bit of bear fabric to make it bigger.  All of the bear fabrics are leftover from the Bear Piano Scarf and the fish are from the back of my Shark Attack quilt, so after adding in a few more pieces from my scrap bin it was a very scrappy quilt indeed.

And with that, my Project Quilting Season 16 is all buttoned up!  This quilt was a very successful experiment, in that the squeaker works and my son thinks the squeaker is hilarious.  I'm linking up my successful finish at the Project Quilting linky party and am already looking forward to next year!