My son gets super excited about Halloween early each year, as in mid-September, several weeks ahead of the holiday itself.  As he decorated mid month, diligently rearranging all the house with our Halloween decor, I realized we had no Halloween quilt in the house and Mr. C. declared we needed a scary one.  The project then began.

I didn’t use a pattern but since Jelly Roll week was in play, opted for 2.5 strips as my starting point.  3 strips for a strip set I could cut into squares.  Easy.  To make it go faster, I added a 6.5″ strip of one fabric in between two of the strip sets and ended up with rectangles to piece together.   Worked like a charm as there were less blocks to sew together.

The 6.5″ strip was to be low volume to balance the brightness of the strip fabrics.   It might just be a tad bright in the quilt, giving the eye no place to rest, but it met the demands of my 9 year old and that is all that mattered.

I debated long and hard about adding sashing to make this quilt larger, and in the end decided to add a border instead.  I used 2.5″ strips of mixed fabrics which framed the big block of squares nicely.   This saved time and it is still plenty of a lap quilt at 58″ square.

For the quilting, I went with more of the Halloween theme.  I drew up 5 large cobwebs with my Frixion erasable pens in the center and corner blocks.    It took time to get in the rhythm of FMQ, but once in the swing of it, I really started to have fun with it.  Since each of the cobwebs covered 9 of the smaller blocks, I added other fun ghost, spider and cats through out on the solid squares.   In hindsight, a heavier thread may have shown up more on the quilt top but overall, I’m happy with it.

Our favorite pet rat Pesky was honored in the quilt as well.  RIP little Peggles, we miss you!

Arguably, it was a quilt it in a weekend project, though with work, family time and the normal daily routines which take time away from the sewing machine, I finished it in under 2 weeks.  That’s a win and my goal was to have it out for at least the month of October.