Raiding the Dwarves' Closet

by Regina Arlauckas
(Churchville, NY)

This quilt was made to match the fabrics in a collection of Seven Dwarves plush, which was the basis of my son's nursery decorations. I took the plushies to Home Depot to the paint department and picked out paint chips that matched the different colors of their clothes, shoes, and hats, and then took those to the fabric stores to find my colors. Frequent visits to all sorts of fabric stores and the bedding departments of a variety of other stores finally completed the stash needed to put this quilt together.

The backing and binding is flannel from a sheet set, and the light creamy color is from a percale sheet set. The remainder of the fabrics are quilters cottons.

The fabrics were all rotary cut to random sizes and shapes, and stitched randomly onto flannel backing strips. The strips were then assembled by stacking front strips and backing strips together, and stitching and flipping to assemble as I went along. I did not add additional batting because the flannel foundation and flannel backing gave enough loft and warmth. There are two different widths of strips which were alternated to give a little bit more interest.

This was my own design, although I had read of this string piecing technique elsewhere.

The assembly of the strips was more time consuming than I had anticipated, and the entire quilt probably took me 2 weeks of sewing every evening to complete, not including the hand stitching of the binding.