I love my tradition of starting off the year with Project QUILTING. The first challenge of the year is usually my first finished quilt of the year. That's the case today!

This year I'd like to focus on using what I've got and making larger quilts to gift, a minimum size suitable for donation to the local NICU up to probably lap sized for friends to snuggle with. The challenge theme of Mythical Creatures made me think of unicorns first. And I knew I had at least three fabrics with unicorns in my stash. I set out to choose a unicorn fabric and thought I would make a 32" x 32" quilt with sixteen 8" finished squares.

I chose supporting fabrics to coordinate with my feature fabric and started cutting. After I cut the royal blue print I realized I didn't have enough of the oranges and yellows to cut out the amount of squares I would need, so I decided to make HSTs with the orange and yellow fabrics.

Next, I was unhappy with the prospect of cutting my unicorn print into 8" squares. I didn't like the amount of the print that would show. The repeat on the fabric is every 10" horizontally and every 12" vertically. Since I'd already cut up my blue fabric into 8 1/2" square pieces I took that into consideration and decided to cut two 16 1/2" squares from my unicorn print. That would mean four or five unicorns per piece depending on placement and I had enough left of my yard of unicorn fabric to have options for placement when I cut out those pieces. No beheaded unicorns. Huzzah!

I reworked the placement of the blue squares and my yellow and orange HSTs. Once I settled on a layout and cut out my pieces the quilt top went together really quickly. Good thing, because I waited until Saturday to start sewing.

The next hangup was that I *knew* I had a box of remnant binding strips and I wanted to avoid having to make binding from scratch and to use what I've got. But I couldn't find the box. I'm not done moving rooms for my studio, so I had even more places to check for it. Once I finally found it there was a blue stripe that would be great and I had enough of it! Next was the task of finding backing fabric. Most of my stash are half yard cuts or smaller, and once again I wanted to avoid extra work, so I was really trying to avoid piecing the backing. I have about a half dozen cuts of larger amounts of fabric so I went to see if any of it would be suitable for unicorns in a blue, orange, and yellow palette. Lucky day! I had a few yards of Kona Regatta.

On to batting. It's been a minute since I've finished any sizable quilt. I usually keep a package of 100% cotton Quilters Dream Select on hand, but of course I didn't have any. And, you guessed it, I didn't want to piece batting. (I'd do that in general, but I was running out of time so eliminating extra steps is key.) I had a partially used package of Hobbs Cotton Wool Blend. My quilt top is 32 1/2" x 32 1/2" so I was hoping my remnant was big enough to use. Nope. It was about an inch too small in one direction. (I've vowed to check the batting situation before I plan the size for the next challenge.) I think my only option in the house was to cut into a 60" x 60" Hobbs Tuscany 100% Wool batting. So, that's what I've used. I figure I can make three more slightly smaller NICU quilts with this batting, maybe for future PQ challenges this season. I'd love to use up this package of batting. The wool batting gave me a nice puffy quilt.

I have another project on my longarm and this is a small quilt so I decided to quilt it with walking foot quilting. I chose to stick with Aurifil 50wt thread in White (#2024) with Medium Blue (#2735) in the bobbin to blend with the blue backing fabric. When I thought I would be using cotton batting I had planned for minimal quilting, but the package on the wool batting says to quilt every 4". (It's always good to check the package.) I still kept the quilting minimum. First I stitched on either side of each of the three vertical seams. Then I did one line of stitching in the middle of each quadrant.

The quilt is machine bound with Medium Blue thread for the top stitching. After four episodes of Gilmore Girls worth of quilting and binding time I put my last stitch in the binding just before 1:45am. My finished quilt is 32" x 32".

Here's a peek of the backing fabric. Almost the perfect match to my blue print.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Mythical Creatures challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on January 19th.