Wrestling with Dr. Seuss

Remember I said I had a lot of yellow in the studio?

The tiny star block in my American Hero Quilt (last post) gave me the idea to try stars on either side of my reader in this child's quilt. Pulling the yellow down from the top row seemed like a good idea too. Using that same dotted print turned out to be too much so I tried another yellow, but with white spots this time. Still a bit much. Maybe red instead?

That's when I decided that maybe four stars were also too much. I removed two and centered two, thinking I would create a checkerboard above and below them to fill in the space. The question then became what to use for the checkerboard. And as much as I wanted to include images other than the ones drawn by Dr. Seuss I just couldn't get them to play nicely together.

I have been tinkering with this project, off and on, for what seems like a long time now. It hasn't really been all that long, I've just been frustrated that I couldn't find what I considered acceptable solutions to the problems I was facing. I also had several days of not feeling well enough to tackle anything this demanding. Consequently I've been reading a lot of fiction the last few days.

Finally I came across a Kaffe Fassett print in my LQS that looked like it could be the answer to my problems. I cut some 3.5" squares, fussy cut some more images from the Dr. Seuss prints, and this is what I now have laid out on the design wall:

It looks a bit busier in person. The KF print is from his paperweight line; it's more dots. Things aren't lined up quite right on the design wall either. I think I'm going to have to live with this for a bit to see if I really like it before I sew it all together. I want to encourage children to read, not scare them away from it!