Last year my mother made a fabulous 'Halloween' quilt from a kit called "Spooks on Parade" from 'Keepsake Quilting' (Still available). The fabric is absolutely gorgeous and she kept all of the scraps. The quilt now belongs to my eldest son and he loves it.
I have 2 other kids and so I had it in mind to make them a 'Halloween' themed quilt using the scraps and some more fabric I picked up in the USA post-Halloween sales. I do want the kids to have a quilt each for the month of October this year....so I set about piecing things last month.
I know that Halloween is not everyone's fancy. But I love the colour combinations of oranges, purples, greens and blacks....and I love the character mix of bats, cats, spiders and stars. But when I looked at this layout above, I was pretty disappointed. Thankfully my mum still had the original pattern for her fab quilt.
Surprisingly I have only made one other quilt from a pattern...the Eye-Spy fussy cut kind. So I was keen to try a pattern and this one promised to be easy to cut out and assemble. The original kit came with precut Fat Quarters in gorgeous fabrics. The pattern was pretty easy to follow as it is a 'Whack and Stack' style, however, my fabric stash yielded FQs of different sizes (Australia and the USA have different measurements...go figure!). So it was not as easy as it should have been.
Then there was the problem of 'orientation'. Some fabrics clearly had a 'right' way of facing, some were '2-way' and others were universal...the spots, stars, cats etc. In the end, I still got the orientation wrong on a few of the fabrics but it doesn't matter.
'Bats on Parade' quilt top
The bats were from precut Halloween shapes from Keepsake Quilting. I added little teeth and eys to make them more comical.
'Jack-o-Lanterns on Parade' quilt top
Likewise I made the plain pumpkin sihouettes into cuter jack-o-lanterns.
I have to piece together a back for both but I am waiting on some black tone-on-tone wide back fabric from 'Hancocks of Paducah'. Watch out for Part 2.
I love your quilts. The bats and jack-o-lanterns add such personality and whimsy!
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