A Very Purple-y Quilt

Lo and behold, a finished project. Ta-dah!  I've been keeping this under wraps until it was delivered for a birthday present on Tuesday to a purple-obsessed now-11-year-old.

This is another part of my master-scheme to complete some of those nefarious WIPS (works-in-progress) that have been hanging around way too long. My second daughter has been obsessed with purple for the majority of her life.  At first I thought it was just the normal 4-yr-old purple fettish, which is when we first started collecting purple prints and squares and putting them in this box. I even had a bunch of star blocks with purple in them left from making a quilt for my sister's baby (7-years ago) and we added them to the box as well.

One day when she had just turned 4 I was bravely trying to bribe my way through a quilt fair with 3 small children. I let the girls each pick a fat quarter to keep them busy while I looked briefly.  I was more than happy to buy this purple fairy fat quarter for the 4-yr-old because it guaranteed me a few minutes of browsing peace.  We added it to the purple box and occasionally would get the fabrics out and look at them.

But somehow the purple quilt never materialized. In my defense, we moved to a new house almost 3 years ago which happened to coincide with the 4 month period of my daughter's life when she decided she was over purple and ready to move on to a new color scheme, and so we created this room and I made a fun new quilt for her bed, and felt like that was a great motherly effort accomplished.

But then the purple obsession returned and with it the guilt every time I looked at that box of purple fabric.  The final straw came this spring when she was cast as the Purple Fairy in the school play, which seemed like some kind of divine intervention, and I knew that purple fairy fat quarter needed to come out of the box and get put to use.

So while she was at 6th-grade camp for a week in June, I hauled out the box and scraped together all the purple fabric I had on hand, and finally created the purple quilt. 

The whole time I worked on this quilt I could hear the voice of Buddy the Elf in my head saying, "That's a very nice purple dress. It's very purple-y..." At first I worried about using so many different shades of purple: periwinkle, lavender, dusty purple, bright purple and then I stopped worrying and just threw them all in.

Some other new and welcome additions include pieces from Sarah Jane's Children at Play as well as some of Doohikey Design's Dress Up Days.  Those prints will always make me feel sentimental for my little girls. I also added a little bit of green, orange and pink to spice things up a little bit.

The back is pieced from the various remnants I had on hand and the quilt was quilted by my friend Monica Steelman, which saved my bacon so that the quilt was finished by the birthday.  I was still binding it the day of, but it did come together just in time. 

I'm happy to finally give those purple scraps a life outside the box, to cross another WIP off the eternal list, and to finally give my very purple-y girl her very purple-y quilt.