Q is for Quilt

As I was looking over the remaining letters I need to make pages for, I could think of an idea for every one of them, but the letter Q. My first thought was quiet, but there's nothing you can really make for quiet. So I left it alone for a while. And then it hit me. Q should be for quilt! And after doing a little thinking about how to make it work for the book. I decided that quilt would be the perfect page for Q.

Supplies Needed:

Fat Quarters or Scrap Fabric
Scissors (Or Rotary Cutter, Cutting Mat, and quilting ruler )
Pencil and paper
Basic Sewing Supplies
Optional: 1/4 Piecing Foot

Here's How You Do It

Step 1: Create a Blueprint

After trying this page once and failing, I realized the best way to start this page is to create a blueprint. So I grabbed a pencil and paper and drew out 9 squares. (Each about 3x3 inches). I knew the bottom row was going to contain a letter 'Q' and 'is for Quilt', I decided to leave the row alone.

With the top 6 squares, I began to play around with different diagonals in the squares. Eventually I settled on the pattern shown below:

It reminds me of the fish I used to draw when I was in elementary school. I think that's why I love it so much.

Once I had an idea of how I wanted my quilt to look, I began plotting where I was going to put in some flaps and pockets. (I mean its not really an activity book if there's nothing to play with right?)

After learning from my first version that you can't double up on flaps. I decided to keep it simple and just have one big flap over the fishes body and a smaller one by the tail. I decided to place a couple of pockets around the fishes body.

Step 2

After I figured out how my quilt page was going to look, I began cutting my scrap fabric into 4x4 inch squares, which I then cut into two triangles. I decided to use blue fabrics for the triangles around the fish. (So the fish would look like it was swimming through water.)

As for the fish, I decided to make it two ways. I wanted it to look like on big fish when the flaps were down and since I had some leftover fish fabric, I wanted it to look like fish swimming through coral or sea weed. (And since I had leftover minky fabric, I used some of that to add some texture to the quilt).

Here is how I pieced everything together:

I was going to try piecing together four triangles in the bottom two squares, but I'm not that great at quilting yet and when I put the four triangles together, my two squares were too little to fit on the page. So I switched it out for some fish fabric and blue chevron fabric.

Step 3

To finish off my page I cut out a 'Q' out of felt. (I actually cut an 'O' out of one piece of scrap felt and then a bar out of another and put them together to form a 'Q'). And then I back stitched on 'is for Quilt.'