The 4H raffle quilt

I've got to say I think this was the funniest project I have done yet. The Wild Westerners 4H club, that we belong to, decided to do a quilt this year that we could raffle off. So I got the supplies. The first part of the project was to have the children participate by decorating a block. I was exhausted by the end of the night, but I still found it to be fun.

I began by cutting 9 1/2" squares of white cotton. My biggest dilemma was the fact that the fabric paints said to not pre-wash the fabric. Any quilter will tell you, you always pre-wash your fabric because cotton will shrink? So guess what happened to my squares.......yup they shrunk. I lost about and 1 1/2" off the squares because they not only shrank, but some of them tweaked at an angle, so to make them all the same I had to cut them down.

My original plan was to only have the sashing of the clover fabric between the squares. Now I see that maybe this was a blessing because my original plan would have been a bit boring. So I had to get creative. So I designed up a double strip border with half square triangles in the corners. When you put them together it almost looks like a plaid.

Anyway I got the quilt top finished and my layers put together. Then it was time to start quilting. Following are pictures of that work.

These two squares were saved for last. They were my most challenging squares. When you look at the front of the squares you may understand why I found them such a challenge. They didn't exactly inspire me, but I wanted to make the squares special. After all some wonderful children were obviously inspired, even if I couldn't see the inspirations. That's when I came up with the art work that ended up on these squares. It wasn't the usual flowers, feathers and echoes I had done on the others.

I drew the designs out on plastic coated butcher paper, the I ironed that to the quilt. That made it so much easier to do this design and keep it symmetrical. By the way I found an LED light on my android and the glass (with book drawer below) on my coffee table made a great light table for tracing the design onto the rest of the paper when folded!