Sam's Football Quilt - In Progress

You must have thought that I dropped off the face of the blogging earth.  I'm still here.  I could blame Nora Roberts for the second installment in "The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy" as reading it certainly distracted me for a few days.  (Now I have to wait until November to find out how they vanquish the evil wizard). I have been working hard on a few projects since I last posted, but some projects take longer than others and sort of evolve as you go.

Sam's football quilt is a good example.

Sam will be 13 in June.  It's hard to believe that my sweet baby is now 5'9" (with no sign of stopping).  Obviously the baby quilt I made for him 13 years ago isn't going to cut it any more.  (This is the big guy holding it.)

He is a HUGE football fan and a walking encyclopedia of football facts and statistics. Making him a quilt with a football theme was an obvious choice.  I started gathering fabric with football prints, (nothing that was specific to a team) and greens and browns to complement the theme fabric.

The quilt pattern I choose was actually a baby quilt from Winter 2011 issue of Quilts and More.  The original pattern was a square, but I planned to make it 4 blocks by 8 blocks instead to make it longer.  I also made it wider by changing a two square block into a four square block.

When I was done with all the blocks and laid them out on the floor, it still didn't seem wide enough for the big guy. Also, the greens and browns worked like camouflage and blended together.  Using white sashing solved both problems, by setting the blocks apart and making the quilt wider and long enough that I decided to go with seven rows of blocks rather than eight.






The quilt still didn't seem wide enough though.  I gathered up the scraps and sewed a quick border alternating the green and brown prints.  The border will go down each side. (I'm still working on this part)

Now I am happy with the size the quilt will be and soon I'll head to JoAnn's for some batting.  Sam already chose a sports themed flannel for the back (I have to make sure that I have enough of it now that I added to the width!).  I am planning on machine quilting it with a diamond pattern (no squiggly lines for me yet!) although I might hand stitch a football in the center of the larger blocks.

I am sure that this will be a quilt Sam can use for a long time.  Once this one is done, I can move on to the other quilts on the UFO list.  There's Jamie's, Peaches', Maria's, a couple of baby quilts... well you get the idea.