My A-Z Animal Quilt

Now that I have created animal crafts for every letter of the alphabet, I thought it would be really fun to put them together into a digital quilt. It makes me SO happy seeing them together!

This collection of animals is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. While there are a few letters with just a single animal craft idea (iguana, x-ray fish, yak), some letters have literally dozens of options for cute, kid-friendly animal crafts. You can see them listed alphabetically or by animal group (mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians, invertebrates, and mythical creatures). 

I thought I'd share the process of how I made the digital quilt, because there are so many other things you can do using the same technique. For example, I've done this with Trevor's annual birthday photos to create a collage of him changing year-by-year. For this A-Z project, I needed the finished quilt to have at least 26 squares, but wasn't keen on the idea of a 2x13 quilt. If I added a title square, I could do a 3x9, which is better but still not ideal. An additional square meant I could do a 4x7. 

Once I knew my aspect ratio of 4:7, I multiplied each number by 300 and created a 1200x2100 collage in PicMonkey. I made 28 squares by dragging in a corkboard pattern. 

Then I dragged in my favorite animal craft for each letter of the alphabet. Here's how it looked when it was mostly complete:

I kept the collage saved in my PicMonkey Hub so that each time I finished a new animal I could drag the photo into the collage. After the x-ray fish, I added an A and a Z to the first and last squares. 

I love seeing some of my favorite projects together like this.