Apple Owl Quilt

Another recent fabric purchase were the half yard cuts of 4 prints of Timeless Treasures Apple fabric. I decided on a 9-patch baby quilt, since everyone seems to be blogging about 9-patches these days, thanks without doubt to AmandaJean :)

My proudest moment was when I selected and cut out all the fabric needed for this quilt except the backing. I felt like I had a quilt kit in my hand, zoom zoom, done!


Thanks to my enormous fabric purchases earlier this year, I have all kinds of solid fabrics in my stash and felt like I was in a fabric store, wandering around with the Apple fabrics and matching the solids to the prints.


The green leafy fabric will be the binding, and the grey-beige the sashing.

And while that plan stayed the same, I quickly decided from looking more and more at the fabric and how cute it is, that I wanted a big quilt with it. If I had made the baby quilt first, I wouldn't have had enough fabric left over...

So, I went back to cutting, and then started making 9 patches...

Making a big quilt had the advantage that I could strip piece more of the 9 patches! 3 strips per fabric pair gave me 8 9-patch blocks, and since I had 4 fabric pairs, that got me up to 32 blocks. I made 3 extra for a 5x7 block layout.


Originally, I had planned 1.5" inner sashing and 2.5" outer sashing, but with only 5x7 blocks, I needed a bit more width, so rather than using more blocks, I made all the sashing 2.5" wide.

Here are the 4 fabric pairs showcased:


I love the owls!



By cutting along the selvage, I managed to get strips long enough for the width of the quilt.


I pieced the outer sashing for the length of the quilts, and am in the process of adding a pieced border out of the left over pieces of apple/owl fabric I had from strip-piecing.


This is how far I've gotten in 3 days, gosh, it feels good to make progress like this! I have the top and bottom pieced strip ready, then there'll be another sashing border, I'll probably use the 2" strips I already cut, because I'm getting low on this particular fabric, and the it's time for binding. Oh, and a backing.

Does anyone else have a hard time picking out backing fabric???

I always try to match the backing to the front, though I see many of you don't, and it still looks great.

Also, I think of quilt backs purely as a necessity to hold the batting in, I look at the top, not at the back, so I don't want to use pretty fabric that I might want to use on a quilt top some day... very tricky!

Any tips and tricks how to overcome this backing-block? :)