Three for Tuesday

We are in Lake Charles, LA and docked at the L'Auberge Casino's little marina. With unlimited power and water here, I decided to get some quilts finished so they could have their spa day in the washer and dryer.

I pieced all three of these baby/toddler quilts while we were living in the RV last month. Once we were back on the boat, I got them all basted. And in the last several days I quilted and bound them. I had high hopes for a higher class of glamour shots, but no sun today, alas. 

You'll have to settle for the classic "rolled up quilts with murky marina water in the background" shot.  All three of these quilts will be donated to Project Linus.

Left to right in the top photo: Pretty Pink Sixteen is made of most of my flannel stash. There is no batting in this one, just two layers of flannel. I did simple cross hatch quilting through the diagonals of all the squares. The binding is regular quilt cotton, sew onto the back. I then sewed it to the front by machine. In this photo you can see the front with edge stitching holding the binding on.

Here's the back, which is long strips of flannel. The line of stitching about 1/4" inside the binding is that top stitching from the front. It's fairly unobtrusive on the back. I really like this binding method and feel like I get pretty consistent results on both back and front.

The middle quilt is a cute soft book panel of bugs and frogs, alternating with lime green seersucker with tiny fruits. So cute! It's called Garden Friends, and I quilted it with turquoise thread in big loop-de-loops. The texture is great, but my loops are, um, lumpy. Stippling is much easier for me and my new rallying cry is, "Stick With The Stipple, Louise! Lumpy Loops Are Lousy!" The binding on this one is rainbow satin blanket binding, but applied like regular double fold quilt binding. 

Here's an overall shot of that quilt so you see how the rainbow pattern on the binding repeats around the edge. This quilt doesn't have great contrast between the blocks so it looks better up close when your eye is drawn to the cute critters. I doubt a toddler will be very critical, though.

I adore the fabric I used to back this little quilt. Check out all the fun animals in sherbet colors! I had one yard of this and used it all.

To fill out the rest of the backing, I used some more of the seersucker. There's a photo of the flimsy that shows the colors better in this post.

The final quilt, Little Boy Blue, was made from a panel plus 25 patch scrappy blocks. See this post for the flimsy pictures. I bound it in the same darker blue as the sashing. The backing is a single piece of fun animals driving cars, with stop signs and words like "Vroom!" That fabric was just a teeeeensy bit small, and one of the selvedges showed after I finished the quilting. On this one, I sewed the binding it to the front first so the slightly wider part of the binding would be on the back and cover the selvedge bits.

Here's a shot of the front binding. To attach the back, I stitched in the ditch right next to the binding on the front. It makes a very clean, nice front finish. Unfortunately, it means I was sewing blind to catch the binding in the back, and that ended up pretty wobbly and inconsistent. The crinkling from washing hides a lot of the wobble and again, the toddler won't care, but I need lots more practice in this method before I'm as happy with it as the reverse method!m

Linking up to Sew Some Love, a linky for charity projects on Kat and Cat Quilts.