My young friend Lin-Z had never made a quilt.  She’d never used a sewing machine or an iron.  But she likes doing art projects, so a quilt seemed like a perfect project while she and her family were visiting us for a week.

Lin-Z likes butterflies and monkeys, and she chose a monkey as the subject of her quilt.  She started by drawing the monkey on a piece of freezer paper (here’s the first draft).  Then she labeled and cut out all the pieces.

She picked out the lime green background and all the colors for the monkey from my stash.  The monkey colors all had Wonder Under on the back.  Lin-Z ironed the freezer paper templates to the different monkey fabrics and then cut out the shapes.

Then she carefully ironed the monkey pieces onto the lime green background, using the draft drawing as a reference.

Lin-Z practiced free motion quilting for a while, trying out several different motifs, including wavy lines and spirals before settling on a classic meander pattern.

She quilted the background using the meander pattern and left the monkey unquilted except for his smile.

And here’s the finished quilt, “Sam”.

What did the banana do when the monkey chased it?
The banana split.