Seeing Stars ... I-Spy Quilt

This quilt has been nearly a year in the making...or star-fabric-collecting at least.  These squares are drawn from 3 different-double-I-Spy swaps, so past swappers may recognize some of their squares.  I've mentioned a few times how much Becca loves I-Spy..  Even since she was about 2, she's loved seek-and-find and the little I-Spy books.  She had an I-Spy birthday party earlier this year, and she has been LOVING helping me look through all the I-Spy fabrics as we've been doing swaps this year.  (If you're not familiar with I-Spy Quilts, each square has a different picture on them, and you generally get the squares as parts of I-Spy swaps.  I've hosted several swaps in the past, and will be doing one again soon.  If you'd like to be notified of the next one, you can go here and fill out the form at the bottom of the post or I have a couple of extra sets of I-Spy squares listed for sale in my shop here.  I also make custom I-Spy quilts if you're not up for making one yourself.)

Becca has an I-Spy Skirt that she loves.  Oh...and did I mention she collects and hoards the scraps left over from cutting out our squares?  She does.  She calls them books since it's usually the folded part from the middle that's left over.

Anyway, Becca also has a cousin that she LOVES named Star.  So as we were sorting out I-Spy squares, anytime Becca found a square with lots of Stars on it, she'd say, "I bet Star would like this square!"  Then we got the idea to make Star a doll quilt with star squares on it.  It took me a while to get started on it...and it turns out there are stars on A LOT of different fabrics once you start looking for them.  And several kind I-Spy swappers sent us extra star squares from their stash when they heard Becca was collecting them.  There are 180 star squares.  Most of them are different prints, although a few came from the same fabric, but have different parts of the picture on them.

Our favorites were the "tricky stars"...the ones that you really had to look for.

I think my very favorite are the stars hidden in this astronomy patch.

We ended up with so many star squares, that Stars quilt ended up being throw-quilt sized.  We didn't quite have enough to complete the color blocks, so there are some fabrics that didn't have stars to begin with...so we did add a few ourselves with a permanent pen.  Fancy Nancy really did need a few stars added to her hair.

And ninja guy really needed a star too.  We tried to fit them in somewhere where it seemed like they naturally went with the print.

And because I've made several I-Spy Quilts now, and I'm always trying to change a pattern up a bit, I added a wonky star to each color block.  It also had the bonus of stretching our star fabrics just a bit farther since one square is replaced by a white one.  I think the black color block turned out to be my favorite.  I'll have a tutorial up for the wonky stars soon.  You can find my tutorial for doing a wonky star block here.

And of course once the quilt was finished, we had to make a special trip to Star's house to drop it off and let the girls have a play date.

For the back, I didn't have enough of any single fabric...and I wasn't feeling super inspired about a fun way to piece it...so I pieced together some largish pieces of different girly fabrics with stars on them until it was long enough.

 
I was in a bit of a time crunch to get it quilted.  I was going to do straight line quilting, but then thought it would be faster to do free-motion stars all over it.  It turned out I was wrong about it being faster.  I like that the quilting matches the theme, but if I had it to do over again, I think I would stick to the straight line quilting and let the fabrics speak more for themselves.

Becca insisted that she carry it.  She did not want it in a gift bag, because, "It [was] not a present...just Star's blanket."

It was a lot of fun for us to have a theme to keep an eye out for, so now we'll have to think of a new one.  We have a family of cousins with the last name Hart...maybe they'll be getting a special I-Spy quilt in a year or two...

I've hosted several swaps in the past, and will be doing one again soon.  If you'd like to be notified of the next one, you can go here and fill out the form at the bottom of the post or I have a couple of extra sets of I-Spy squares listed for sale in my shop here.  I also make custom I-Spy quilts if you're not up for making one yourself.


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