Drum Roll, Please!!!!!

After three and a half months, the Kid’s World Quilt is complete and is hanging on the wall in its new home.

First of all, the back story.  I got a call from our pastor in March asking if I’d be interested in making a quilt for a wall in the new kids addition at our church.  I immediately said yes.  Originally it was going to hang over a stairway.  After some discussion between the powers that be that decorated, it was decided it would hang on a two story wall at the front of the building.

On March 26th, I headed to Grubers and bought fabric.  The next day, I started the quilt.

First the grass, and then the sky.  The next step was the sun.  By the end of April, the tree was added.  In May, I started making birds and animals.    In June, there were flowers and bugs added.  On June 29, the larger of the two quilt pieces was on the quilt machine.  It came off the machine at 2 AM on July 4th.  The second piece came off the longarm on July 9th.  We had a binding party the next week.

On July 17th, the quilts were hung.  The two pieces together are 12 feet wide and 14 feet 3 inches tall.  That’s a two story wall they’re hanging on.

 

This little red guy may be one of my favorites.  There were circles in the fabric, so I just quilted around them.

 

Thank you, Mickey Depre, for letting me “borrow” the idea for the ant!

My favorite funky flowers.  They look a little bit like modern hollyhocks.

The idea for the little girl came from Carol’s flickr account.  (Check out her blog for some seriously fun stuff!)  Then I had to draw the little boy.  Have I mentioned that I can’t draw!

Who doesn’t love a puppy???

By the last day, I was seriously sick of machine quilting.  If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that I have a hate-hate relationship with my longarm quilting machine.  The very last thing I quilted were the rays of the sun.

Well, waddayaknow!!!!!  There are feathers on those sun rays.  I actually did it.

This project has stretched me far beyond what I thought I could ever do.  Transferring an idea from my head to fabric was a long, sometimes scary project.  I’m beyond thrilled with the results.  While this quilt won’t change a little child, the whole kids building and the people who work there will.  There are so many people there that will love on those little kids.  They’ll be Jesus with skin on.

And that’s why I made a ginormous quilt.

 

A Creative Adventure

I have a new project and it’s a big one!

Our church is adding on a new kids wing.  It’s big!  It’s bright!  It will be fun.  In the front foyer, there is a massive wall that’s really boring and, dare I say, ugly.  So the other day I met with the decorator, who is also a crazy  friend.  She gave me paint swatches and walked me through the building.  We measured the wall.  I did a little math.

This quilt is going to be 12 feet by 15 feet.  Yikes!

First of all, there’s no way I’m going to put a 12 foot quilt on my longarm, so it will actually be two quilts.  Second, the entire plan is in my head.  That scares me just a little bit!

Yesterday I headed to the quilt shop.  Let me just say I love Sue at Grubers Quilt Shop!  Sue opened the quilt shop thirty years ago and shared the building with her dad’s meat market and a gas station.  When I first went there about 25 years ago, my credit card bill showed that I purchased gas from the gas station instead of quilt fabric.  My Hero got quite a kick out of that.  Everyone there is very helpful.  Or, if you’d prefer, they just leave you alone and let you make a mess pulling fabric, which is what I did!

Here’s what came home with me!

I don’t know about you, but that makes my heart sing!!!  There is so much potential in that pile of fabric!

My first step is to create the foundation of the quilt.  The bottom fourth of the quilt will be grass.  That’s what the eight green fabrics at the bottom of the stack are for.  Once I have that finished, I’ll tackle the other three fourths of the quilt.  That will all be sky.  See that t turquoise blue bunch?  Yep!  Sky!

After I have the foundation of the quilt done, it will be time to start decorating!  See the browns?  There will be a big tree.  The light tans will be a path.  And of course there needs to be sunshine, so I’ve added oranges and yellow.  The rest will be flowers, critters, birds, and kids!

And now it’s time to take a big breath and start cutting.  I’m going to go make grass.