Ellie Fun

Working on the Wizard of Oz pillows (and waiting not-so-patiently for the final panel) made me interested in the Quilting Treasures website, where I fell in love with an adorable, adorable elephant pattern by Karen Neuburger. It was impossible to find in local stores, but fortunately the internet came to my rescue! I bought the first four fabrics from Bay Window Quilt Shop online, and it's still one of my go-to online shops. At the time I had still never actually pieced a quilt, and so I had no idea how much fabric I would need. I bought a full yard of each of the bright squares you see.

I had been planning on just taking the four of them and alternating for a simple four-patch quilt but when I got them all together, I learned my first important lesson about shopping for fabric online. While on my monitor they had looked PERFECT together, in person they looked, well, kind of bright. Like, kind of punch-you-in-the-face-bright. The photo looks toned DOWN actually. And the pink elephants weren't *quite* the same saturation as the purple elephants and flower fabrics. Ooops.

Fortunately my mom was out, and she and I dragged those for fabrics to the Savage Quilter in OKC (my absolute favorite shop of all times) and picked out some much-less-intense-looking greens and pinks to sort of mellow it out.

Also we bought the striped pink fabric for binding, because it was just plain too adorable to leave there.

I made the quilt using the "tube" method, with what turned out to be 8" squares. I found a great white w/ pink polka dots print for the inner sashing, and the slightly-too muted to be an inner-square pink elephants made a great outer border around the quilt.

Here is the final product:

And, the adorable elephant border! I'll admit, I sang "Pink Elephants" from the Dumbo movie the entire time I was sewing it on. :-)

Plus the pink striped binding...

 
And the backing, pieced with more Savage quilter fabric and the scraps from Ellie Fun.

 

This Quilt was also professionally Quilted by Another Mary Ann. She Did adorable elephants in the lighter fabrics, and flowers in the Elephants, and it turned out really nice.

 

This quilt was supposed to be a gift but... it turned out that with all the fabric I'd bought, I had enough to make 2! One went to my little niece in Texas, and the other lives at our house.