I Tawt I Taw a Tweety Bird

Ever since I made the crazy dog lady quilt back in March, I've been on the lookout for interesting fabrics to make another stack and whack quilt. Last guild meeting, Karen brought a huge bag of vintage baby fabrics for the scrap table. This rather fetching Tweety Bird fabric from 1988 caught my eye...

Bright! Cartoony! 1980s colors! While this could have served as a perfectly suitable backing for a quilt, I decided that with the three repeats it would be great for a 60 degree stack and whack!

First I cut and stacked the panels, pinning through the three layers to align the repeats as exactly as possible. Then (given that the panel was ~17" wide but not cut straight) I cut three strips 5.5" wide. I double checked the alignment then cut triangles using my Creative Grids 60 degree ruler. Lots of triangles!

I used two sets of three repeats per hexagon, alternating the blades but maintaining as many internal hexagons as I could.

I made 18 hexagons all together, and had a few half triangles from the beginning and ends of rows to play with. All I had to do then was pick a backing fabric which was actually fairly difficult! I mean, I do own a fair collection of yardage but not so much in solid colours or in these somewhat pastel 1980s colors.

I auditioned three fabrics:

... a Kona solid blue (used for the binding on the Ikko Tanaka Quilt) and a Dear Stella navy blue with little yellow birds (from the E-I-E-I-O line) that I bought for a song (ha!) at Save-A-Thon in Harlem. Both looked pretty good but I wasn't feeling it and kept going back and forth, then pulled another yard of Timeless Treasures "Farm" fabric from my stash, and well, how could I resist?

So I pressed, cut strips into triangles and then cut a bunch of half triangles to use with the leftovers from the Tweety panels to fill in a few of the blank spots. My foster dog Chinso decided again that a laid out quilt in pieces was too irresistable and that he needed to help me out a little.

 "Help"

I mis-cut some half triangles which meant that I didn't have quite enough fabric to frame out the top, but I did have enough to add a little width to the sides, and voila! A quilt top!