I Spy anyone?

Not so long ago I had not seen an I Spy quilt.  My grandson has a game where you search for items, but it is in a box and has several cards with different sets of items.  You have to draw cards and then find the item on the picture card.  I was doing some surfing on quilting and sewing sites and I found an I Spy quilt quite by accident.  I thought it would be a really neat project to make one of these quilts.  I started looking for fabric with little objects in mind.  I had my friends looking through their stash.  Then one day, again surfing, I found an I Spy Swap.  If I got on the list before it filled up I could buy 10 pieces of fabric (or find it in my stash) and fussy cut 20 pieces from each piece and end up with 200 4" squares that I send to the address from the website, and I would receive by return mail 200 different 4" pieces.  How cool is that?

About two days ago I received my pack of 200 different squares, and what a selection.  I had already bookmarked the site so I could have a plan for my first I Spy quilt.  The first thing I did was to pick out 88 from the bunch that might work for my grandson.  I wasn't too fussy with my picks, just didn't choose things that were too girly.

 I put them up on my design wall to get a better picture.  I decided I wasn't going to get too picky with the positioning... I could drive myself crazy.  After I had them kind of set up, I had to turn them to orient them correctly so I wouldn't be picking them off the board and have to remember to turn them before I stitched them together.  My design wall is wider than it is high. The original pattern used white sashing with blue. The inspiration and pattern, and swap came from a neat web blog page, Obsessively Stitching  I thought that white would not be a good choice for a little boy, so I looked through my stash and came up with my red theme.  I think it was a great choice.  The pattern is based on a disappearing nine patch.

 

I have not even thought about what I will do for quilting on it, nor have I considered the backing or binding.  I do know that I want to put a strip of 4" squares on the backside, but not sure just how I will do it.

So if you have not seen an I Spy Quilt before, I will have to post a new image when I have it totally done.  I was just impressed that I got this far already.  After I had it all pieced together, I sat down in my chair with a pencil and paper and tried to see how many items I could list.  There are 88 squares, and I think I have 345 items that I came up with.  I think I will have to include the list I came up with for the Mom, but she will have to make the decision on how she will use it.

Just another fun project I thought you might enjoy.