Christmas Time Is Here

Well, not it is not really here at the moment... but I have yet to come up with a pattern title for this quilt and I guess that would do nicely... sounds all Charlie Brown-ish.
This quilt was designed with a friend's husband in mind.  He lost his mother two years ago after a battle with cancer.   He and his wife have three small children and to keep his mother's memory alive for them he has continued the Christmas tradition of decorating the house at Christmastime with Snoopy items.   His mother loved Peanuts, especially Snoopy, and he loved to rib her about all her Snoopy junk but he secretly loved it when she would get it out every year.   
I decided to add to his Snoopy junk by creating a lap quilt for the family to share as they gaze at the Peanuts Christmas tree and remember all the fun his mother had collecting the ornaments and decorating her tree with them. 
I picked up the cloud fabric at a garage sale and thought it was absolutely perfect for the background!   I also had fun with the binding and fussy cut the strips to make the binding match the quilt pattern.  So fun to do!
I couldn't decide if I wanted to use a cozy minky fabric for the back or a licensed Peanuts print.  I went to JoAnn's armed with coupons and decided if I didn't see a licensed print that would work then I would go with a minky.   As I scoured the Peanuts prints I saw this and it was perfect- and not on sale either so I could use a 50% coupon! Awesome!  But apparently Christmas prints were on sale for 60% off and this rang up as a Christmas print- even better!    I have some extra fabric too so I may make some bow-ties for the boys and some scrunchies for the girls... and may have enough for a little skirt too... we'll see! 
Again, due to copyright reasons I cannot sell this pattern but I do take custom orders!

Joe Cop

My favorite Jack of all trades!
I saw an image floating around on the internet of Joe Cool as a police man. Now, he never did appear in the strips as a police man but I can certainly see him as a police man! 
Two of my brothers are police men and I had to try turning Joe into a police man, and I did!  It was tricky, but, I think, it turned out quite well!     I was able to find some awesome handcuff material for the background; isn't it great?   I couldn't decide which I liked best, the gray or the blue so I bought each.  I think I like the gray the best as Snoopy pops better, but both are great!

Joe Doctor

Designing Peanuts quilts is so fun, especially if it's Snoopy.  I'm not sure there's a trade the Joe Snoopy hasn't done at a some point.   Doctor (well, Surgeon in the strips), lawyer, author (he thinks), golfer, tennis player, jogger, elite skater- he's done it all and I still think his dog house is a Tardis.    That pattern might emerge some day.  I digress...
This quilt was on the back burner of my mind for some time.  My second pregnancy was a roller coaster with a very good end result.  I wanted to thank my midwife and also wanted to thank our pediatrician for the great care he's provided for our other child and thus I finally had the reason to sit down and design and make this.  (Trust me, I have more designs than I have time.  I just wish I could legally sell these Peanuts patterns, but I never hear back from the proper authorities...)
I made two of these and purchased enough fabric to make a third for my niece who is in nursing school.   After making two of these I was burned out and set the materials aside for the third... and now a year later I'm finally picking up the material again and it is all cut and waiting to be assembled! 
I also designed the image sans Woodstock, and thought about making this quilt without Woodstock, but decided it's just too cute of an element to the quilt to omit. 
What Peanuts design would you like to see?

A Boy and His Dog

This quilt is quite possibly the fastest I have ever done a quilt from start to finish...  There were no hiccups in the quilt at all, which was nice!
I had three Peanuts patterns I still needed to make so I asked my FB friends which one I should do next and I may choose the popular vote.  This one won by a huuuuge landslide so I figured I should make it even though my brother tempted me with the most sincere quilt.
I found the sweet background fabric at Hobby Lobby.  I'd been ogling it for quite some time to use for the background of the quilt so I guess it was a good thing that they still carried it by the time I decided to sew the quilt.
I ended up giving this quilt to my aunt... her comment on the FB poll made me want to give it to her so once it was finished I boxed it up and mailed it to her- which caught her very, very surprised.  :)

A Boy Named Charlie Brown

My mother found this fabric and called me to see if I wanted it.  After hearing her description I told her, "Definitely!"   I could already see this one in my head!
I got a little crazy and decided to do a chevron border... which took about twice as long to make as good ol' Charlie.  Yeah, twice as long.  AHHH!   Maybe should have had my head examined when I thought it would look awesome.
However, it did turn out pretty cool and there is something else I must confess; the blocks were supposed to be a finished size of three inches and they ended up being a 2 and 5/8 finished size... so apparently my math needs a bit more work to get the size right.   That's what I get for trying to be conservative on the fabric usage and make the blocks the exact (ha ha) size instead of making them a bit larger than necessary and trimming them down. 
Math and I never have gotten along too well. 
I decided to be a bit modern with the back and made a chevron going across the back.  This chevron I made the intended size so I suppose I do sometimes learn from my mistakes.

The Snoopy Dance

Who doesn't love it when Snoopy kicks up his heels and dances?
This quilt was a pure joy to make- it was very fast and sooo much fun seeing the pixels slowly turn into an image.   I  was a little concerned that the feet motion would not translate well but it turned out very well!
I entered this quilt in both the local and state fairs.  Unfortunately by itself it did not win a ribbon but it did win in a special category- The Most Humorous Quilt.    Snoopy is just that irresistible!
The ribbon for the Most Humorous quilt was about as quirky as the Snoopy quilt!
The finished size of this quilt is 44x58.
If you ever see a quilt on the blog that you'd like to have made hop on over to my esty page and send me a message.  I can do Peanuts quilts as well as video game pixel quilts.

The Sopwith Camel

Second of my Lil' Folks series is The Sopwith Camel.     Who didn't sit on the edge the seat waiting to read more about the World War 1 Flying Ace's adventures behind the enemies line?  Who else was saddened when The Red Baron shot the birthday cake that the Ace was so kindly trying to give him?

 This is the first quilt that I have cut and pieced in an almost twenty-four hour span.    If one had a free day one could easily piece the top in a day.    The top half takes a little while as it works with 1.5" strips but the bottom portion moves very quickly as one uses large rectangles.
The bullet holes were decided upon after I pieced the top... I felt the quilt was missing a bit of personality so bullet holes it was!  They didn't turn out quite how I was envisioning, but they still add nice charm to the quilt.
When designing the pattern I tried work Snoopy's grimace into a pixel but it just didn't look quite right so I decided I could stitch a grimace.  I'm really glad that I decided to go this route as it turned out so well!

The background fabric was purchased at JoAnn's.  Isn't it a marvelous background for this quilt?
The white, black, and green were all scraps from other projects- as was the batting!      It's so nice to be able to use up scraps- heh, well, can't say that I "used up" the entire stash.  That would be miraculous.

Joe Cool

Reading Peanuts was a staple in my life.   As a child my brothers and I owned many dozen of the Peanuts paperback books and spent hours reading and rereading them.   In the last year I began to start collecting books from the Complete Peanuts set and have been reading them.  It's pretty amazing how many of the strips I had read as a child- especially since the bulk of the strips were written before I was born.   I also have a sneaking suspicion that my sense of humor was greatly influenced by reading the strips.
 Over the past two years I've created many video game pixel quilts and it started me thinking about what else is already quite pixelated that could be turned into a quilt and Peanuts came to mind.     I sat down one night and began to mess around in my photoshop program and began to feel as though I were eight years old again and playing around in paint!   After some fiddling I figured out what I needed to do and inspiration for a new series of quilts was born.
Thus far I have finished two quilts and have the patterns written for two more.  There are so many ideas I have for Peanuts quilts that I have a feeling only a small portion of them will ever come to fruition.  Ah well.
I decided the first quilt in the series to make would be Joe Cool.   Partly for the fact that, hey, it's Joe Cool and also partly because I've been wanting to make my brother a quilt and his name is also Joe.   I recall that as a teen he had a Joe Cool shirt and he tended to wear it with some pride.   Who wouldn't?  Joe Cool is, after all, well... cool!
After creating so many large quilts recently it was pleasant to work on a lap sized quilt.  The finished size is 45x57.   For the background quilting I stitched paw prints.  I give myself a D- (just don't call me Peppermint Patty, please!) for them.  They're tricky little buggers!     Isn't that snuggle bubble just gorgeous?   Instead of working with 57" long strips I broke the background into large chunks.  Doing so saved so much time (and thread and fabric) and it also makes the Snoopy print stand out much better.  Of course though after sewing a gazillion 1.5" black and blue squares together I went, "Duh! Why did I not sew two 1.5x X strips together and then cut them to size?  It would have saved so much time!"  Ah well, I have another Peanuts pattern that switches between two colors pretty frequently so that pattern I amended to do this technique.  Live and learn, you blockhead.