Slightly Suessical

Ok, so you may need to use your imagination on this one.

I mentioned a few months back that I was going to make a Suessical truffula trunk quilt for my friend Rose's baby. Well... the baby came a couple days ago, so I had better get started (although I heard that babies aren't supposed to use blankets... so who knows).

Anyways, I had purchased a bunch of bright fabrics that matched both the baby's room and the theme of the book (just slightly less pastel- I guess more like the Lorax movie), with the intention of piecing together random chunks of color with black to represent the stripes on the truffula tree trunks.


Ok... so these images show the trunks being either yellow or white and birch-like... so I guess I'm making an interpretive, stylized quilt. Ha ha... I wanted it to be colorful.


 

So here's where imagination kicks in. I'm not very far on this quilt yet- so far I've only cut out and pinned together the pieces for the five trunks. 

Usually I'm hesitant to do wonky cuts for quilts because I hate wasting so much material. But since we're going Dr. Suess, I figured it kind of needed to be wonky. The best way I've found to cut pieces that fit together well is to cut them both at the same time! I began by placing the edge of the black fabric near where I wanted to cut the green, then placed my straight edge at a slight angle and cut through both fabrics with the rotary cutter. I tossed the little wedge of black, and now the black and green pieces have complimentary angles.

Green on top to cut the black pieces.
I then switched the green fabric to the top and placed the edge near where I wanted to cut the black piece (see above) and repeated the process again.


It will seem like a lot of waste is being created. What can I do with a bunch of colorful fabric slivers?

 
Eventually, I had a whole table full of puzzle pieces (don't mix up which one goes where!). Pinning them together is a bit interesting... I didn't really worry too much about making sure they were perfectly aligned, since I'll be cutting a curvy piece out of the center later. But if you were shooting for square edges, you'd want to line up the pieces so the corners overlap about 1/4" from the edge (so when you make the seam, it opens up to be flush). See below...


All in all, I pinned together the five strips of wonky tree trunks. I plan to sew them together tonight and possibly cut them out with the teal background fabric. We shall see! 


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