bad to the bone

Why do I love making Halloween quilts? I mean besides the fact that they are so much fun and make me smile everytime I see them? I like making them because they allow me to experiment more and I'm almost guaranteed to have good color contrast. The fabrics are wild and I know that the quilts can be wild and I will only have to look at them for 6 weeks of the year (even less if I really don't like it - but that hasn't happened yet).

If there is a technique that you are dieing to try but feel nervous about, then make it in Halloween fabrics. If you hate the outcome, you can make it into a kid's quilt - they aren't nearly as fussy as adults are. They'll love the ghosts and spiders and whatever other creepy-crawlies you end up with. Try something new. Explore this month. Sorry for the lecture - I'll stop now.

After I made my Halloween Houses quilt I went off on a letter making tangent. After several more quilts, I decided I wanted to explore free-piecing some more. I wanted to make a large Halloween quilt to hang behind our sofa. As I was making blocks for it, I made this skeleton with the words "Bad to the bone" and decided that I loved how it turned out SO MUCH there was no way I could just let it be swallowed up by a bigger quilt. So I sewed on a bit more black fabric on the top and right side and then the black and white batik on the other sides and I had a wallhanging.

Meet my skeleton. I hope you can see how he's constructed (if you're interested) by double-clicking on the image and going to the close-up. He's basically sewn in rows - the skull, the torso, the pelvis, the legs. I made the head first and then figured out how big to make the next row and so on. He's certainly not well-proportioned - but that's his charm, for me anyway.

I quilted black perle cotton unmarked fans everywhere but on the skeleton. I used perle cotton to outline each of the shapes on the little dude so that he'd stand out.

I finished this quilt in May 2001. It's 16 1/2" x 20".