Dinosaur Fun

39 weeks pregnant is... perhaps not the optimal time to start a quilt. With my daughter, I put the final stitches on her Winnie the Pooh quilt while contractions were 12 minutes apart (and Trick or Treat was done several months beforehand). But as is often the story with second children, I was too busy chasing the first (and having a rough second pregnancy) to get ahead of the crafting game. So although I've had the feature panel picked out for a while, I am just now getting to the nuts and bolts of fabric selection and composition.

I started with the Have You Seen My Dinosaur panel, by Wilmington prints. I love the colors in this, and it's hard to find a dinosaur panel that says "boy" without screaming it. Serendipitiously enough, I actually bought this panel in September of last year, exactly one month before our son went from "gleam in our eye" to "baby in my belly."

I love panels, but working with them is often a challenge. I wasn't terribly huge on either of the "suggested" designs that got released with the line (Designer PDF), so my mom (who also quilts) suggested a book called Panel Play.

I've done improv quilting with panels before (most notably on Spookyville), but the Panel Play book ups the game a bit - it has some neat ideas for putting panels in a "frame" of diagonal stripes, or making certain design elements appear to "spill out" of the panels, and it encourages a lot of creativity and use of a design board to "design as you go." Given that I have no plan yet, but want the quilt oh, next week or so, such an approach is not without its appeal.

Next up, the creative process. See Dinosaur Panel Play 1.