'Dinosaur Backs'

I can't show what I've been working on this week (in case by some miracle I happen to be given a space in 'Sew-Vivor'), so instead I thought I'd finally take some finished pictures of a quilt I made some time ago for my son, which we named 'Dinosaur Backs'.

The whole time I was working on quilting my daughter's 'Magic Forest' quilt, my then three year old son kept asking me when I was going to make him one, too. Having already picked out a fabric with dinosaurs on it, he'd even drawn me a design for the quilting which he named "dinosaur backs".

Yellow on orange is not the easiest to photograph clearly!

After piecing my daughter's quilt top, I had a fat quarter each of some woodgrain fabrics left over and when I finally started working on my son's quilt I realised they matched perfectly with his chosen dinosaur print. I then gave him a neutral-coloured solid and some Pentel fabric crayons and asked him to draw on it to make his own fabric.

At the time I was playing around with a pack of 2.5" candy squares in 'Comma' by Zen Chic, doing half-square triangles for the very first time. I noticed that they also tied in quite nicely with my son's fabrics so I began to have the makings of a whole quilt.

After playing around for a while, trying to make all the elements cohesive, I decided to make the dinosaur and woodgrain fabrics into half-square triangles as well. When I squared them up, I was lucky I realised I needed to make sure I kept that angle correct or I would have ended up with really wonky blocks!

Lining up the 45 degree angle of my ruler on the angle of my blocks before trimming to size.

I tried out a few different layouts but my son wasn't happy with them. :P

I finally managed to come up with a layout my son approved of, so I could begin sewing everything together. 

I apparently didn't take a picture of the completed top, so here's a picture of the whole quilt before binding.

I quilted in the ditch for all the arrow parts, and the tiny pieced half-square triangle patterns, then I quilted a straight(ish! :P) line in the woodgrain arrows to emphasise the arrow pattern and bring the half-square triangles together. I also echoed the straight line quilting in the arrow portions of the tiny half-square triangle pieced blocks, continuing the pattern in the unpieced bottom corner.

I couldn't find the picture of the original 'dinosaur back' quilting design my son had drawn for me so he drew me a new one, this one he specifically called a 'stegosaurus back' design. :D
I then used that design for all of the dinosaur print parts, and along the long strip of his drawn fabric up the side.

I used my free-motion foot for all the ditching and quilting, and a lovely variegated Gutermann thread which I'd had left over from the 'Backyard Baby' quilt I'd made for my nephew.
And when I was in my favourite quilt store (I found it when I was looking for online stockists of Aurifil thread and was delighted to find the physical store was situated so close to me!) searching for a suitable backing fabric, I happened upon this lovely orange print that was also from the 'Comma' collection, and used it for the binding as well.

I ran out of the comma fabric, so I also used some leftover woodgrain prints to finish the binding.

 Today when I took it outside to take these photos of the finished product I discovered an effective way to hold the quilt so I could take pictures: safety-pinning it to the neighbours' hedge. :P

-Strange.