After completing several Wendy Gratz patterns, I’m really am enjoying the applique process. A coworker is expecting a baby and I wanted to use a reptile in the design. I wandered around on the web and found the Turtle Tale block in Animal Parade 2: Charming Applique Quilts for Babies by Cheri Leffler.  I love the turtles, but not the quilt design (LEFT). So, I wandered around until I found Hedgehog Heyday in Fun-Sized Quilts: 17 Popular Designers Play with Fat Quarters complied by Karen M. Burns.  I love this setting (RIGHT).

So, I bought both books and used EQ7 to work out the block design to merge these two patterns and increase the “fun size” quilt to 12″ (finished). I’m calling this Turtle Heyday and it will end up at 59 x 59 inches, if I keep the borders. I’ll use one of Cheri Leffler’s turtles in each turtle block. By adjusting some of the sizes in the HedgeHog Heyday, I can use those instructions on how to make the pinwheels and border triangle.

The colors here do not represent the real colors of my fabrics, but having a printout helps keep my straight on which fabrics to use where. I print a copy of this and write notes about the fabrics I will use. I often change my mind as I make each block.

I usually don’t bother to upload my actual fabrics as they are all from my stash and sheets. I just use this as a legend.

Here is my initial layout with just the 12.5 inch (12″ finished) blocks to look at the overall colors. My feline helper is “Cookie”. She kept bellycrawling over to sit on the quilt no matter how many times I shifted her off it.

I like the overall colors and look, but if you look at the bottom left, you can see that the green border around the diamond-block blends in with the corner block. I tested using that red fabric as an additional log in the log-cabin block, but thought it was too jarring. I ended up using white, two layers thick to avoid the green turning it grey.  I found the center of the block and used that to align the new logs to end up 1 1/2 wide.

I need to construct the final, triangle blocks to finish the setting.  I quilted each block individually.