Pinwheels on Parade

So here is is the quilt I have been making for Philippa, Pinwheels on Parade.  I was inspired by Four Wise Monkey's pinwheels in the park, I liked the pinwheel design but wanted smaller pinwheels.  Loving all the colourful quilts around the blogs lately I decided on a rainbow colour scheme.  So I downsized the pinwheel block and set to work making pinwheels.  The pinwheels, including the white are made entirely from my scraps.  I had some of the on parade fabric from the children at play line and thought it would be cute with the pinwheels,  building up the rest of the quilt from there.  

I have more pin wheels that didn't quite fit, thought about using them for the back but ended up strip piecing instead.  Most of the strips are pieced, again to use up my scraps.  Possibly I should have made this up at two separate quilts but I love it how it is.  Below are my two little quilt holders showing off the back.  They didn't much like hiding behind the quilt!

 

It is quilted it by hand.  I took a long time to decide to do it this way, because of the doubled sidedness I was quite keen on an overall design and spent sometime working out an all over machine quilt pattern.  But I am not so good at machine quilting and really don't enjoy wrangling with my machine, even with such a small quilt.  So instead I used 7 different perle 8 cottons and ignored the reverse side, quilting to complement the front.  Spirals for each of the pinwheels, straight stitching around the boarders and complementary stitching the panel, with extra ghost balloons to fill in the white space.  I think the quilting works and I do like the look of hand quilting plus the process is very relaxing.

I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding to continue with the theme and as nothing else I had was quite right.  Finished size is 48" x 56".

So there it is.  Philippa has watched it being made and is very possessive of it, as any almost 2 year old is of something that they think is "mine".  But for now it will go away till her birthday.  It has been made to fit her cot which will, sometime in the next 6 months will be converted to her big girl bed!

Oh and I have entered it into Stitched in Color's festival of scrappiness.  Because of the panel I was a bit hesitant to enter, but I think it fits the 60% requirement.  Every bit of fabric except the white and pinwheel boarders and panels of parade fabric were scraps on the front and back.