Boo to you!

Who doesn't love Halloween fabric?  I just love everything about Halloween and when I saw this fabric for sale on Fatquartershop.com I couldn't resist.  
 It's Boo Crew by RJR Fabrics.

 The dancing skeletons are so cool and I love the colour and expressions.  I really wanted to showcase the material and not cut it up too small so thought about using offset log cabin centre.  That wasn't working for me so I searched for images with the keywords halloween quilt and found lots of inspirational stuff.  Nothing there was quite what I wanted. 

After a few days of mulling it over I had an idea I wanted to do squares within a square on point.  I'd never tried it before but thought it looked really good and would showcase the material in the centre block.  Not knowing how to go about it I Googled some more and found a free Riley Blake design called Spooky Squares.  It was perfect for what I wanted.  The original pattern was a 5x5 block design which was a little too wide for me so I made mine a 4x4. 

While the squares on point look really great I have to say after 16 of them I had enough.  I hadn't discovered chain piecing when I made this and each block made one at a time took some time and there came a point when I knew I wasn't going to get it finished by Halloween.  Still I decided to carry on and finish the top and quilt it later, hopefully before Halloween 2013 comes around!

I ran into a little trouble with the sashing.  Not with colour choice this time around but size!  Oops one of my blocks was off and it was a struggle to sew the rows together neatly.  I also cut some points but I can live with that.  I realised after watching an episode of Quilty (free videos by Mary Fons for beginner quilters) that I should always cut my sashing and borders to size and then sew rather that just sewing them on and cutting the excess off later.  Any creep with bias edges will be pulled back in with properly cut and pinned borders.  Oh well, live and learn!

I also had a bit of difficulty with material quantity.  I had plenty of material for the squares themselves but borders and binding I miscalculated and ran out.  So I bought more material not in the same range as not available at LQS but a co-ordinating colour and the bright green neon squares - I love this in the quilt.  It really makes the squares pop out at you (not so nice as a FQ on its own!)

I had to rip out a border piece and replace with a piece from the backing material I had bought on sale after Halloween as I was so slow making this quilt top!  I bought this lovely print of Howloween by Deb Strain for backing and the colours co-ordinate so well a piece of it has going into the border. 

So top finished,  Backing fabric and batting on hand, I will surely get this finished for this Halloween, right?