Boos and Ghouls QAL - I love Halloween!

A few weeks back Bryan House Quilts announced a Quilt Along that totally caught my attention.  It was a super adorable combination of a pixelated quilt and a celebration of Halloween.  My boys love Halloween - and so do I!  It's such a perfect kick off to all the fall holidays and who doesn't love chocolate?!?

In the initial design there was a plain ghost (already super cute) and a second variation on the pattern for a girl ghost with a bow.  I don't do girls.  :)  So I decided to try to design a few more variations on the basic ghost so that each of my boys could have a ghost of their own. 

Here's what I came up with using the poor man's version of a design tool - excel

I was able to use all stash for this quilt top - which was destined to be a table runner for my dining room.  The first 2 ghosts were kind of no brainers.  Spencer's fascination with all things mustache and Quinn's distinctive glasses were perfect inspiration.

 

The next two ghosts took a little thinking.  I love the idea of a ghost in a bow tie, but I didn't want to just have a single plain ghost.  I settled on a ball cap.  But when I went to put ball cap ghost together, I couldn't put a black ball cap on a white ghost with a black background.  Soooo...  the hat became orange.  I had briefly contemplated making all the accessories in the boys' favorite colors, but I thought a purple mustache would have been too weird.

 

The final 4 ghosts turned out pretty cute - and I actually love the pop of color on that orange hat.

 

 

Next up - what to do for the back...  I went digging through my stash again and found some Ghastlies fabric I had bought a while back and never had any idea what to do with - UNTIL NOW!  How perfect!

 

 

 

I wanted to machine quilt this project - and actually started that direction - but, truth be told, I'm really not very good at machine quilting.  I hope that someday I can improve my machine quilting skills to the point where I don't feel like I'm going to ruin every project I attempt.  For this one, I abandoned the machine quilting and went back the old standby of hand quilting.  I kept things really, really simple and just outlined each of the ghosts and their accessories.

 



After a simple black binding was added, they were DONE!

 

I loved this project.  I know that this will have a place on my October dining room table for many years to come.  Thanks Becca for a super fun project!