Dr. Seuss' 'The Lorax' for a baby quilt

or...

How I learned about the charm and pitfalls of sewing Ric-rac on a quilt

I don't often get the chance to make a baby quilt, so when the opportunity arose I went to the quilt store and found more darling fabrics for baby quilts that I could ever hope to dream about.  

  Since this is for a boy I chose Dr. Seuss' 'The Lorax'.

(my left shift key and the letter d don't work on my keyboard for some reason)

Naturally, after I brought the single yard  home and cut apart all the 'pages' I was instantly stumped on how I wanted to piece them all back together.  I decided on clean, primary colors for the sashing.  Of course, after I sewed all the red sashing on I went online to look at quilting motifs and found a way cooler idea online than what I had done, but it would have needed more money & more fabric selection...so there ya go.  

I don't do a lot of pieced quilts.  My biggest mistake here was sewing the Ric-rac down after I had pieced the pages with the red sashing but before I had sandwiched it and backed it and quilted it.  dumb.dumb.dumb.   The Ric-rac is quite big and stiff and it pulled every seam of the thinner fabrics underneath.  If I would have stitched it on to the quilt sandwich I believe the sandwich itself would have provided the needed stability to secure such coarse embellishment.  

Lesson learned.

I didn't want to just meander stipple the whole piece, nor did I want to individually stitch each page and  I couldn't really do that given that I had already stitched down the Ric-rac (with rainbow isacord). 

 

I ended up just going with a mirror ric rac for the inside of the pages.  The red sashing is free motion quilted in a design that matches the Seuesian tree shapes.

Free motion quilting in between the 'bumpers' of Ric-rac was challenging. again. dumb.dumb.dumb.

Where the Ric-rac ends met I was going to sew on giant primary colored buttons.  I decided that for a baby quilt the felted buttons were a better choice.  Those were fun to use and could be stitched right down with my free-motion foot!

Here's a shot of the lower third of the back and the label:

 Serendipity gave me a nicely framed area left by the story page on the other side.  The added button was fun to echo the buttons on the front. 

 

Tomorrow will get the calligraphy stuff out and enter the info.  

Any advice about using Ric-rac are appreciated! 

Thanks for looking.