You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch

I know it's the next to last day of January, but we're gonna back up a bit to some of the Christmas sewing I did this year because who doesn't want a little extra Christmas, amirite?

This particular sewing was all for my little guy, the world's biggest Dr. Seuss fan (see here, here, and here for past evidence). Despite being scared of the actual Grinch cartoon (I know, I know), he loves anything with the Grinch on it, so when this Grinch Advent calendar panel (from Robert Kaufman) arrived at the fabric store where I work, he jumped on it the moment he saw it.

Miraculously, I actually managed to finish it by December 1st, and we kept up with moving the Grinch along all month. We always travel for the holidays, and a few days before we left, he commented that we were going to have to have someone come over to the house to move the Grinch while we were gone. Ha! You can imagine how excited he was when we told him we could take the calendar with us. I think this one will be a favorite for a while.

I used a candy-cane print from my stash for the binding. Since this calendar hangs on the wall, I wasn't too worried about the backing, so I pieced it together using a bit of another Grinch print I had, along with a red and white herringbone print.

Then, about a week before Christmas, we wandered into Joanns for some notion, and of course they had the Christmas fabrics right up front, so B insisted on looking to see if they had any Grinch fabric (because, obviously, we needed more). I actually bet him that they wouldn't, a bet I obviously lost. I simply couldn't turn him down when he asked if I'd make him a Grinch quilt, though I warned him that I wouldn't be able to do it until after Christmas because there just wasn't time. He agreed, and the fabric came home with us.

True to my word, it was the first project I undertook when we returned home, and I took it easy on myself by just making a simple wholecloth quilt. The flannel I used for the backing had been hanging out in my stash for a while, and this seemed like the perfect use, combined with a black and white dot and a green Cotton + Steel Dottie print for the binding. For the quilting, I went with a simple diamond crosshatch in red thread.

B's slept with it every night since I finished it, which makes for one happy mama.