This quilt brought me to my knees...

I am working on my first ever watercolor quilt - fusing 1" squares of fabric to a fusible gridded interfacing, then stitching along the grid to form a mosaic design. It is still a work in progress, but I thought I would share how I spent 4 hours yesterday, mostly on my knees.

I started with an image I found online, and through various manipulations I turned it into a mosaic pattern (tutorial to follow on this someday - I hope). The general gist of it is a seahorse in a bed of seaweed underwater. This will be the center panel of a baby quilt for a mommy who loves seahorses.

I used the printout first as a fabric buying and cutting guide, and then primarily as a guide to assembling the seahorse - once I had that in place I got a little more freewheeling with the seaweed and water squares.

I started out by unrolling the interfacing on the kitchen floor (and yes, I have way more than enough, but there is another project planned for the remnant). The bottle of sunscreen is anchoring the interfacing where it ran in front of the heat vent since it was blowing things all around. I did have some trouble seeing the grids because they were light brown on a brown floor, so I added a piece of paper under the area I wanted to work on to help.

I slid my pressing mat under the interfacing, adding a few placemats under that to catch the heat and steam, and started fusing things in place right on the kitchen floor (the floor was clean - my in laws had visited the day before!) Once I was able to get up and around the seahorse itself to get it fused down, I decided to move the entire operation to the ironing board.

Unfortunately, even with the estimates provided by the pattern I came up short on my fabrics and right now the top of the seahorse is barely under water. I need a trip to the fabric store to get just a few more inches of the blues, and to determine my borders, backing and bindings.

The baby shower is May 10th - don't think I am going to make it - but I may surprise myself.