Dino designs and puppy dog tails

Now that I've finished one of the projects on my to-do list, I've started planning for the next new one.

I decided that my niece and nephew (turning 10 and 7) will get lap quilts for their birthdays this year, in August and September.  She LOVES puppy dogs and he LOVES dinosaurs.  Her favourite colour is green, his is blue.  So that makes for an easy start, but then it got harder.

I wanted to make sure the quilts weren't 'kiddy' so that they would last for a long time, but also I wanted them to be fun and bright, not 'adult'. I didn't want something that was heavy in applique because then I might risk not having it finished in time, which has been the fate of my music quilt.  I had decided that I was going to use a pattern (not design it myself) and make use of interesting fabrics in a pieced design.

Doing a google image search for "dog quilt" brought lots of ideas, both using dog fabric and pieced blocks.  I eventually came across There's a Dog on my Quilt.  It must be an older pattern because it is rather hard to find, and even harder to find as a stand alone pattern, not part of a book.  Postage costs for the book (from U.S.) was a bit much when I only wanted one pattern, but eventually I found a copy of the pattern for sale on a very old blog post.  Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the pattern was soon flying it's way around the world to me at a very reasonable price!

In my searching I found this picture of the quilt:

Photo courtesy of The Quilt Show

 
I liked the idea of the plain blocks to show of a nice print fabric, and only using the 9 patch blocks as alternates.

Then it was on to finding fabrics, but I'll leave that for another post.











The dinosaur quilt happened in a different order.  Google searches for "dinosaur quilt" returned lots of images of baby quilts.  For a 7 year old boy, that wasn't going to work.  Girls might still give into the 'cute' factor, but boys aren't going to want anything that is baby-ish.  In the end I went hunting for fabrics and found this:

Photo courtesy of Bug Fabric

Perfect for a boy who isn't a baby!  I found Bug Fabric and they have an awesome range of animal/creature prints!  From there I found some other coordinating prints, and built a design around it.  Since the dog quilt actually had a dog in it, I didn't want the dino quilt to be just plain repeating pieced blocks.  I gave in and added some applique to my design, but hopefully it will be simple.  It's just a silhouette in one colour.  This is the design I've come up with:

That's my first rough go at designing a quilt in Photoshop.  I know there are gaps between the blocks, and the fabric scales aren't necessary right, but it meant I was able to pull the fabric samples off the website and insert them, rather than relying on colouring in graph paper with a pencil.  Not bad, if I do say so my self.





All the fabric comes from Bug Fabric so once I work out yardage (do we ever say 'meterage'?), I'll be putting in my order.