Fox Faced

Inspired by a knitting chart I found on Flickr and a stack of orange napkins I picked up at my last visit to Housing Works' Buy the Bag thrift store, I whipped up this cute little baby quilt last week and them pinned him to my fig tree.

I was super tickled by how it turned out, especially because every single fabric used in this quilt was reclaimed or recycled! Besides the napkins, I included pieces of a linen shirt (free on the street), the lining of a cotton skirt (brown) and a pillow case (green) from Housing Works BtB, a bed sheet from Etsy for the backing (previously used here), and strips of leftovers from my last quilt back (also from Housing Works BtB!) for the binding.

I've talked before on this blog about why I've restricted myself to shopping primarily from thrift stores for my own clothing, and more recently I've been trying to apply that reasoning to my crafting. Over-consumption of supplies is something I've fallen prey to many times (7 foot yarn storage closet?!), and with quilting it's almost a requirement to have many different fabrics on hand with which to create. I know I work best when I can pull stacks of fabrics out to audition for backgrounds and bindings etc. but I have a lot of fabric. Not as much as some but I'd like to be more conscientious in using what I have and reusing wherever possible. For example, queen sized bed sheets make for excellent backs because by their nature they are wider than quilting cotton. Now I need to stop buying all the cool bedsheets I see at thrift stores. Ha. I'm not perfect, but at least this is a start!

The quilt is constructed around a 4.5" (unfinished) square representing each stitch in the original knitting chart. My napkins were approximately 16.5"-17.5" square so I decided to merge the original blocks into strips to minimize seaming. I planned everything out on graph paper beforehand, calculating the sizes of squares and rectangles I needed to cut and how many of each I needed from each fabric.

I then used that diagram to plan out the order of assembly (the red lines above), breaking the quilt down into manageable chunks with the final long seam occurring under the fox's eyes. Because of the restricted size of my starting materials I ended up with one seam more than might strictly be necessary, but it's centered so I don't mind so much. I'm the kind of person who will straighten pictures in stranger's houses and rearrange things of shelves to be symmetrical so believe me, if it wasn't centered it would have driven me crazy. The finished quilt is 44" square.

I am loving the rhythm of straight line quilting right now, particularly using right angled stitches of a set length to space my rows (in this case I had my stitch length set to 10st/inch). For some reason whipping the quilt around on my tiny machine just feels so satisfying! I quilted the face quite densely, every half inch, and the background more loosely at every inch with the stitching in these two areas occurring at right angles. I really like the way this gives the fox face a little more depth.

 

I think there may be more 8-bit animal quilts in my future (I already have one more planned out in full), but in the meantime I've been working on turning the rest of the cotton skirt the dark brown fabric came from into something completely stylistically different. Hopefully by the time I finish that quilt my yard will have started to show some signs of life. I swear spring has sprung back there but somehow I managed to miss all of this in these photographs!