When Hazel Met Andy Quilt Top

Hi Friends! I'm popping in today to show you my latest quilt top finish, When Hazel Met Andy.

When I was doing research for this quilt, I wound up pulling my color scheme from soup cans.
(No, really.) Granted, they were the limited edition Andy Warhol Campbell's tomato soup cans that Target sold a few years ago, but STILL. Soup cans.

You see, my younger sister is a huge Andy Warhol fan. And when I was thinking about what kind of quilt to make for the little bambino in her tummy, I couldn't decide. How could I top my niece's epic quilt that will probably hold a permanent spot in my top five favorite quilt makes? Forget topping! How could I even match it? Would this little one know that I loved him as much if his quilt was blase in comparison?

And then the idea of an Andy Warhol quilt hit me. It's been done before, of course, but I'm not sure it's been done using Elizabeth Hartman's Hazel the Hedgehog II pattern. (And if it has, that's totally okay too.) I pulled out my trusty kona card, matched a bunch of solids to my computer screen's representation of the soup cans, and crossed my fingers. Thankfully, I liked the fabrics when they arrived, and my sister, who owns all four cans, can tell me how well I did when she gets the quilt.

I used Architextures cross hatch prints for the background fabrics. (I know the yellow and orange are Curry and Tangerine, but I don't know what the white on white and black on white are actually called.) I wanted a little additional texture in the background, but nothing too big, and I've been wanting to justify the use of Architextures for a while now, so it all worked out well. If I could do it differently, I'd switch the face and body colors of the above block. It's quite similar to the other bottom block, even if those yellows are ever so slightly different. But I'm not sure I could have visualized that properly from soup cans and a stack of fabrics, and I'm happy with it all the same.

I haven't yet decided how to quilt it, and it will probably be the first quilt I tackle on Stella. I quilted my niece's first initial into her quilt, and that's the only thing my sister requested about this quilt. She wants my nephew's first initial quilted into this one. Can do.

This is the child's size version of the Hazel the Hedgehog II pattern, and it finishes at 48" x 54". I used a lot of spray starch on this one, which is unusual for me, but there are so many seams to keep flat that I found it easier to starch.

Do you have any ideas about quilting? I did hand quilting, FMQ, and straight line quilting on my niece's quilt, and I think I'd like to repeat that with this one.