Jungle Squares - my Quilt Along with my Niece

For Christmas last year I got my then 8 (and now 9 - soon to be 10) year old niece a quilt top kit for us to sit down and work on together.   I figured it would take us a few afternoons or evenings to get the top pieced together and then we could find some boarder fabric - I'm thinking two decent sized boarders since we want it to be a bigger quilt for her - and some fabric for the binding.  What I hadn't banked on was my pregnancy ending up in me being on bedrest for the last 4 months so we couldn't really work on the blanket until this weekend.

My husband took Niece T out to the mountains yesterday to Climb Mount Yamnuksa - she did AWESOME!  By the time they got home from the climb it was getting pretty late and so we decided to save the sewing until today so she was bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to go!

The mountain my niece and my husband tackled yesterday - it was her first scramble and she did so awesome!  

I had her lay out all the squares and design her own quilt top, she came up with a few different patterns:

This was the pattern on the quilt label that she wanted to see how it looked, but Niece T wanted to do her own pattern.....

Then she came up with this one....

Finally she decided on this one - she liked how the rows were (from top to bottom) purple, black, purple, black with her dark 'jungle' fabric in the middle part of the quilt.

I have only sewn with Minky fabric once and it was the cabbage swirl - what a PAIN IN THE BUTT it was!!  This quilt is minky fabric, its not nearly as difficult to sew with then the cabbage swirl but it was a pain to line up and my sewing machine kept eating the fabric if I didn't have a leader piece on.

Niece T did sew the first two squares together and after we had a little fabric slip up that involved some seam ripping she asked if I could help her.  Together we sewed the far left row of the blanket together this morning.  Hopefully we can get together and do the rest of the quilt top in the next few weeks so I can find the boarder fabric somewhere in town if not I think I might have to order it online.  I'd LOVE to get this blanket done with/for her before Christmas since it was last years gift to her and it would be nice to have it done so she can cuddle with it (she a huge soft blanket fan!).

I'm super happy with how well she did designing her own top and cant wait to see how nice it is when its all done.


Ohhhh - Day 9 of Blogtoberfest and I've even managed to post BEFORE noon - that never happens!