Back on December 5 I blogged about a little pile of fish fabrics - some recently gifted and some I had on hand. When I have quite a few pieces of any themed fabric I like to see how many different quilts I can make from the fabrics. Well, so far I'm managed to go play "Go Fish" and have ended up with three different kiddo sized quilt tops and have two more in the works. I usually make a quilt with bigger pieces and then work on down to a quilt that uses the smallest pieces.
1. Life in a Fishbowl
To make the fishbowls I used a free pattern called Life in a Fishbowl by Wendy Sheppard for Michael Miller fabrics.
The fish fabrics are cut 6.5 x 12.5 so that's why I started with this one hoping to get that size of piece from several different fish fabrics.
I used a couple of different old green calico printss that were similar in value. For the fishbowl stands I used some 2.5 inch width scraps that I had on the side of my cutting mat waiting for something to do.
2. This one was inspired by the book Nine Patch Pizzazz by Judy Sisneros. The book is more of a method and tips book that shows how to combine large prints with nine patches. This book inspired a couple of other quilts I have made in the past but instead of using nine patches I used other 6 inch blocks with a large scale print.
The one large print fish was one that would lose the fish if it was cut much smaller.
The other large scale print was a seaweedy looking fabric with blue, pink and yellow flowers.
For the Nine Patches I added in a mottled blue and a variegated green wavy print. And finally there's a swirly blue border.
3. Smooth Sailing
For this one I made 8 inch sailboats using the free pattern at Generations Quilts. I had a few sky fabrics and all had white sails - the same white I used in the fishbowls. And the boats are cut from the same 2.5 inch pile of scraps as the fishbowl stands. But instead of adding "water" to the sailboat blocks...
...I sewed the sailboats together into rows and then added rows of fishy sea water below the sailboats.
And now I'm going to play "Go Fish" and maybe end up with a couple more tops soon.
And sew on...
