Originally Posted by TeresaA

I am a great auntie! Hurrah. My niece is around 6 months and will be coming back to the states in early May. I have been swaying toward making a quilt or making something else for her. This weekend I leaned hard toward making a quilt.

The little girl loves her Horton stuffed toy, so I saw some Dr. Seuss fabric and snatched it up. I thought, oh gee, it will be so easy to make a quilt out of this. I'll do something really simple. (Her family doesn't really understand quilts so I thought better of spending a whole lot of time when the quilt could quite literally be thrown away in a year or two. But I wanted to make a quilt anyway, because they are the people who have EVERYTHING so it is the only way to give something unique.)

Note to self regarding the Seuss print: rainbow prints can make your life tough...really, really tough.

I hemmed and hawed. I literally made blocks for a whole quilt yesterday and then decided I didn't like it with the Seuss fabric

So after auditioning more fabrics, at about 5:00am this morning I thought I had a good plan. The few blocks I laid out together looked great! I liked it, my DH liked it, my quilting artist SIL liked it. Success! But then I started piecing things together and suddenly, success was failure.

The quilt is way too busy. Way too. Do any of you know of tricks to make this arrangement less busy? Or should I just give up on this fabric and make something else..... Yes I have tried putting white blocks between the 9 patches. Looks terrible. Yes, I have added more blocks. I find that the larger the quilt gets, the busier it looks.

Anyway, if you have an aha moment regarding what could help, please let me know. If it's anything too labor intensive, I probably can't do it. I need the quilt done in a couple of weeks. But if it's one of those miracle solutions, I'm all ears.

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Thank you!