The wheels on the bus go round and round

Boy, these little 40" x 50" quilts stitch up fast! Especially when you start with a panel with big blocks like this. I actually started with three panels, all in the same design but three slightly different colorways. They were sales samples from a Robert Kaufman line, I think. 

The panels were raggedly cut on the edges, so I trimmed off any blocks that didn't contain a complete vehicle. Then I bordered each panel with a black and white stripe and sewed them into rows. Red sashing and binding picked up one of the colors used in each panel.

All the partial panels got pieced together willy-nilly improv style and trimmed into two long strips that I put on the back with a chunk of orange stripe fabric. The quilting is just simple wavy lines in bright orange thread, running the same direction as the vehicles. They kind of look like those motion lines you see in cartoons.

This close up of the back shows the partial panels and the color variations. One bike has a white background and the other has off white, for instance. The third colorway uses a pale gray. When all mixed together, though, it seems to work as a single piece. That's good, because I needed all the fabric to make a complete quilt!

The colors are so vibrant, but I can't seem to capture them in today's high overcast light. But the blue matches our chair cushions nicely and the orange goes with our safety line bag. It's the little things that count.

Many of my quilting friends don't know that before we lived on the boat, we lived for nine years in a bus. So when I showed this quilt to Sean, he immediately pointed at the buses in the bottom left corner. Once a bus guy, always a bus guy! So I named this little quilt Buses Etc. I hope it will comfort a little person through Wrap a Smile.