Blogger's Quilt Festival - Halloween Quilt

One of the first big exposures I had to the world of quilting blogs was Amy's Creative Side's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  She hosts them twice a year, and stumbling onto one of these, a year ago was a huge revelation for me!  I've made so many on-line friends by connecting to some of the fellow bloggers who have posted quilts on her link-fest, and I've even been able to meet a few in-person!  I've also learned a ton, and been so touched and inspired by countless other bloggers' posts.  Thanks Amy!

The timing couldn't be more perfect!  I just finished up this quilt yesterday, and thought it'd be fun to post it on the Fall 2011 Quilt Festival.

It all started in September during a lunch and fabric shopping trip with a friend, right after our kids started school for the year.  I'm not a big home decor kind of gal.  In fact, we moved here 2 years ago, and just look at my bare windows (blush).

Needless to say, I don't do a whole lot of holiday decor either (sigh).  When I saw this Halloween fabric at the quilt store, it didn't initially "grab" me, but once I found out that IT GLOWS IN THE DARK,  I HAD to get some, which meant that I had to make a quilt LOL!

I based the quilt on the "Children's Delight" pattern in the book, "Quilts From the Quilmaker's Gift".  I've made a lot of quilts from patterns in this book, including my recent Project Linus Quilt.  It's an easy pattern, which came together fast, which is great, because more and more, I've been enjoying the process of the actual quilting more than the piecing.  My machine has been a bit naughty lately, so I did about half of it free-motion quilting, and about half of it is done with a straight stitch, or decorative stitches that anyone can do quite easily, even when your machine is not behaving.

My photographer was my tween son..  It was windy, which made it a bit challenging, plus my dog wanted to be part of the action too, so here's the great picture of the back that he took (he took the top picture too)!

Here's a few details of the actual quilting.

Can you see the spider web in the corner (all done with a straight stitch)?  The narrow orange border used a decorative stitch that reminds me of "stitches", and when I started the green binding, I still had orange thread on my machine from my Project Linus Quilt, and was thrilled at how it looked... a happy mistake.  I liked it so much, that I decided to use orange "fangs" to machine stitch on the binding.

And did I mention that it GLOWS IN THE DARK?!?!

I hope you'll take a moment, if you haven't already to check out all of the other amazing quilts on Amy's Blogger Quilt Festival!!