Canon's Graduation Quilt in David Butler's Parson Gray Curious Nature

Warning:  This post is very picture heavy !   I finished Canon's high school graduation quilt this weekend and Katie helped me get it all documented in pictures.  We went to Unity Village in Lee's Summit yesterday and got some beautiful pictures in between rain storms.  The cloudy weather made for some great picture taking!  I really wanted to make sure this quilt made a statement as being "all boy".  So many fabrics are too feminine to make a great guy quilt.  When I discovered that Amy Butler's husband, David was coming out with his own line of fabric prints, I started frantically searching the Internet trying to find them.  Needless to say, so were many other quilters!  These prints were flying off of the shelves at online fabric shops.  Between Hawthorne Threads and Etsy shops I was able to accumulate all the prints that I wanted. Below are the prints I chose............

I also found a pattern on Etsy that I purchased in PDF format to make this quit.  After I got all my blocks cut out, it was time to get really organized and start sewing the sets together...

After all my sets were completed I moved to the living room floor where I had a big enough space to lay them all out and rearrange them until I made sure no two patterns were touching each other.  After I got them all lined up I took the first row back to the sewing machine and then Riley did some rearranging of his own.........

Guess this little stinker wanted them in a different order!  This is what the bichon does every time I work on the floor.  It's a battle I can't win and it's too entertaining to put a stop to it!

Once all the blocks were sewn together I went back to living room floor to sandwich the three layers together...........

All these pins went into securing the quilt.  Approximately 400 of them !

Riley does not like the feel of the safety pins, so he stays a quiet observer up on the couch!

I used a meandering free motion quilting technique.  I'm guessing this part took about 6 hours on my machine.  I kept the right side rolled up while working and I started at the top and worked my way down in about 5 inch sections at a time..........

I had three fat quarters left over that I saved for the binding.  I cut it at 2.5", folded it in half, sewed to the front and hand stitched to the back of the quilt....

We found this old park bench at Unity Village that really worked good with the colors of nature in the quilt........

Another shot inside a stone pavilion..........

Here's a shot of the back of the quilt..........

and a close up of the front............

These fabrics are also very soft and were easy to work with.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what other prints David Butler comes out with in the future.

Canon with his new quilt.......

I had a busy winter making this quilt and a quilt for my niece, Madison, who is also graduating from high school this spring.  Click here to see Madison's string quilt in Amy Butler prints.

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