Grinch: Blocks 1-5 of 10

I bought a Grinch panel at the Pacific International Quilt Festival this year (PIQF purchases) and set my self a goal of making it up with only fabrics from my stash.  Here is the panel with 10 Grinch scenes as purchased.

I decided, since Dr. Suess has a whimsical, twisty way of illustrating, that I wanted this quilt to have some quirkiness.  I have never tried tilting blocks before so I was going to give it a whirl on this one.  Also printed panels have a way of not being printed squarely on the fabric grain and are often distorted, so tilting would disguise that.  Here is my rough plan for the quilt.  If I do put in those 8 square rectangular fillers, the squares will be stack and whack and not uniformly lined up as pictured.

I began pulling from my stash to find fabrics for the frames for each image.  I had a blast!  (I also made a huge mess, but that is par for the quilting arena.)  Here are the first 5 blocks with my reason for choosing the framing fabric I did.

I got his fabric in a surprise collection when I used to subscribe by mail to a fat quarters medley of the month from Keepsake Fabrics.  It is a rather large scale Christmas print and with only one fat quarter of it, I never quite knew how to use it.  I picked it for the book cover illustration block because it has the right red, the right green, and because the gold picks up that of the Grinch's eyes.  I also liked that the spikes of the flowers echo the spikes around the blast encircling the Grinch.

This fabric came "free" inside a plastic snowman cookie jar I bought at JoAnn's Fabrics many years ago. Is is a very graphic yellow and red pattern that reads sort of like orange and almost hurts your eyes with its brightness.  I thought that sort of in-your-facedness suited Dr. Suess and look how perfectly it matches the wrapped gift in front of the dog Max!

OK, this next block has a green inside and  red outside so I did not want to border it with either of those colors.  I'd already introduced yellow in the last block and I found this paint speckled fabric in my stash.  The yellow ties in with the star on the Christmas tree and all the dots tie in with the ball Christmas ornaments on the tree.  See how much fun this picking fabric thing is?



This next block was bordered in red so I wanted to go with a green frame- but should it be sickly monster Grinch Green or lettering kelly green?  I found this fabric was perfect since it had both greens.  And remember in the TV special where Boris Karloff in his deep voice sings the song "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch"?  There is a line in the first verse "You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel".  Don't they look like banana peels all over the place?

The next red bordered block needed to be framed in green.  But ya gotta have that Grinch Green, too.  In the next block I had this stripe left over from another quilt.  The yellow lines in it brings out the Grinch's eyes I think.  And the lines also accentuated his snakelike skinniness.

Well I am going to stop blogging so I can get back to sewing.  So far no newly purchased fabric yet in this project.  Oh, and by the way, this is what that green stripe was left over from.  Sweetly springtime and not  at all Grinch-like, I'd say!