A Quilter's Journey - I-Spy quilt

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm posting a completed quilt - about one a week - to follow my journey as a quilter from its beginning.  Today's quilt is an I-spy quilt.  I saw the concept on-line, and thought this would be a great way to use up some of my novelty fabrics.  So I pulled out all the different items I had, and started cutting.

One thing I learned very quickly - fussy cutting fabric can be tedious.  I cut 48 different 3" squares of fabric before I ran out of variety.  The size was picked based on the general size of the fussy pictures, rather than a real plan for the finished quilt.  Then I cut 160 little 1" squares of blue interlock to create all the snowballs.

When I started to consider the layout, I thought sashing with cornerstones would work best - and I carefully fussy cut 1" squares for all the cornerstones - 63 of them.  I sashed and bordered this quilt with interlock fabric, and used one of the novelty prints on the backing to provide stability. The interlock has a lot of stretch, so that was necessary.  The binding is the same fabric as the back.  At this point, I still hadn't worked out the details of 1/4" binding, so this quilt has a large binding.  The quilt was finished in April 2004 and donated to the local children's hospital.