not your grandma's quilt...

when i got my sewing machine, i knew i wanted to make a quilt. but not one of those old lady country quilts that grandmas make for their cats to sleep on. i wanted a contemporary quilt made with bright, graphic fabrics. so i scoured the internet for patterns and settled on this tutorial from cluck cluck sew. i liked the circles and figured i could make it work for my purposes, but thought it was still simple enough for a beginner to tackle.

raw edge circle quilt

next, i went fabric crazy. some are "designer" (a.k.a. extra pretty) which i picked up from a quilt shop in payson and an etsy seller. others are just generic finds from joann's and walmart.
i ended up with 32 different fabrics...most are dots/circles and florals, with a few stripes for contrast. and a couple ugly ones. my aunt is an amazing quilter and she swears that the best quilts have a few ugly or mismatched fabrics thrown in, so i went for it.
i officially started working on my first quilt on monday. first, i washed my pile of fat quarters in a mesh bag to prevent fraying. then i ironed out wrinkles and trimmed loose threads. next i cut out 48 - 8.5" squares and 48 - 6" circles. then i matched them up (fun part!) and sewed each circle in the center of a square. they looked so pretty i had to take a picture of a few...
...but these aren't the finished blocks. today, i cut each square into fourths. (i was a little sad to chop up my pretty squares, but i toughed it out. haha.) i ended up with this fat pile of 4.25" squares--192 to be exact.
then, i laid out aaaaaaaaaall of those little squares into reassembled scrappy squares (another fun part!). it took awhile because i'm crazy and had to make sure the same fabrics weren't touching and the colors/values were balanced. :)
once i got all of the obsessive-compulsive tendencies out of my system, i carefully pinned and labeled each row. now these little beauties are ready for me to start sewing tomorrow.
not too shabby for my first 2 days of quilting, huh?

i can hardly wait to finish the top so i can order my backing fabric! i think i'm gonna go flannel back. we like snuggly blankets at our house...the snugglier the better.