A Prickle of Rainbow Hedgehogs

 

 Oh, Hazel, you have been one of those quilts that I've fallen in love with since the moment I saw you because of your fun quirky personality.  And now I've finally made a Hazel Hedghog quilt and I love Hazel all the more. 
Angie of Gnome Angel has been hosting a quilt along for the Hazel Hedgehog pattern for the month of February.  This was precisely the excuse I need to pull out my copy of the Hazel Hedgehog pattern by Elizabeth Hartman that I had purchase a few months ago and actually put it to good use. 
Trying to stick with the  Sew My Stash 2015 challenge and wanting to do something fun, bright and quirky as befitting Hazel's personality, I decided to dig into my stash and pull fabric that I could use to give Hazel some rainbow spines! 

 I love the pull I was able to make from my stash and I even pulled a few pieces from my scrap basket too.  I had some light gray crasshatch type fabric that I loved for the background of the quilt as it gives it some subtle texture without detracting from the rainbow spikes.  Unfortunately, I only had 1 yard and the pattern calls for 1 1/4 yards of background fabric for the baby sized quilt.  I decided to go ahead and cut out what I could so I could get started.  And to my great delight, I discovered that if I was really smart about how I cut out the background fabric, I was able to just barely eek out exactly what I needed from a yard of fabric with only a few tiny scraps left over!!  

 Although I had a few other sewing projects that were more pressing at the start of February, I couldn't help myself but sew together at least one Hazel before I put this quilt away until later in February. 

 She turned out better than I had pictured!!  It was so hard to put this one away for a couple of weeks, but prime motivation to get my other projects sewn and out of the way!

 Once I picked back up this quilt, I decided to batch assemble the rest of the hedgehogs.  I felt it went much smoother to assemble all of the block at the same time instead of one at a time mainly because there are so many small yet different pieces so it was easy to sew on all of each type of piece before moving onto the next piece needed to make the block. 

 I ended up staying up far too late one night assembling all the blocks into a quilt top.  Totally worth it though!!  After I got the top done, I ended up being without my sewing machine for a few days as it was serviced and had some minor repairs done on it.  Perfect timing to hunt through my stash to find a backing and binding for it.  I ended up pulling out a black and white chevron minky fabric of which I had just enough for a backing.  And my just enough, I mean that there was only 1 inch to spare on the top and bottom! 

Not feeling super confident in my free motion quilting skills yet, I decided to go with a simple diamond grid patten on this quilt.  I love the texture it adds.
For the binding, I had trouble deciding what I wanted to use that would perfectly compliment the quilt.  After going back and forth on a few different options, I decided to go with a scrappy rainbow binding using some of the same prints I had used to make some of the spikes on Hazel. 

 Don't you just love the look of binding all pressed and ready to go onto a quilt?  I know I do. 

 And here she is all done!  Finished size, its about 36" by 40" - a perfect baby quilt size.  And I was pretty happy that by making myself really look at what I had on hand, I was able to produce such a cute, fun and quirky baby quilt 100% from my stash.  And I'm so glad I went with a scrappy rainbow binding!  Definitely a binding choice I think I'll use again in the future.  

 A completely unplanned but happy accident is how amazing the rainbow binding looks on the back of the quilt!  Its almost squeal worthy. 

Naturally, a hedgehog quilt deserves to be photographed in the woods.  The day that I had a chance to go get some photos while my husband watched the kids was actually one of the warmest days we had had in a while and since then.  It was a beautiful day for a walk in the woods - super fluffy snow on the ground and big flakes coming down from the sky.  The lighting wasn't as good as I would  have liked, but still - it was pretty.