I spy four four patch I spies

Today I have four little quilt finishes to share. I made them all at the same time as a single big project, starting with Val's I-spy square swap. 400 bright, happy novelty squares arrived in the mail, wowee! To tame that madness, I first sorted the squares into color families. I sewed four patches of two dark and two light values within a single color. Black, white and gray were lumped together. Then I bordered half of the four patch blocks with a light sashing in the same color family, and half with dark. So the final blocks each clearly "read" as a single color.

I ended up with more blue blocks than any other color, but the mix of subjects in any color wasn't particularly "boyish" or "girlish." That pleased me, since I wanted each quilt to end up with a nice mix of everything from dump trucks to butterflies, and they did.

These two quilts will be donated to Wrap A Smile. One is all the yellow, pink, and orange blocks. The second is some of the blue blocks, and most of the green and aqua blocks.  And that's a bit of downtown Boston in the background, looking mostly gray. It was a gloomy day, but the rain had washed all the salt (and seagull poop) off this slanted gunwale so it was clean enough for photos. Plus, the wind was minimal!

The back of the pink/yellow/orange quilt is a single piece of this fun hot pink animal fabric, and the binding is a pink stripe. Wrap A Smile's label is stitched right on top in one corner, before quilting.

The blue/aqua/green one has this super fun, large scale dinosaur print on the back that matches the front colors perfectly. The geometric binding looks like it's cut on the bias, but it isn't.  I need to have a much better idea of who will be impressed before I do bias binding. 

All four pieces were quilted with a big, loose stipple in a variety of kinda-sorta matching threads. That quilting motif is super fast for me and each quilt took about 40 minutes.

The other two quilts will be donated to Quilts Beyond Borders. This one uses all the purple blocks (there were only four,) plus red and blue. I left the cleat in the lower right corner of the photo for that jaunty nautical look. One of my online guild members, quipped, "I'm gonna have to get me a boat to use as a backdrop for my quilt photos!" All you really need is a cleat, Kathleen.

For the back, I went with red fabrics. Isn't that Siamese kitty fabric darling? I love that they are all napping on various red and orange quilts. The binding on this quilt is a red stripe, and I used another piece of that same fabric to join together the larger pieces on the back. This allowed me to easily piece in the QBB-required label, and it ties the back nicely to the front.

The final quilt is the last one I put together, with the remaining blocks. This is all the black/white/gray ones, plus a smattering of blue, green, aqua and red. Not quite as coherent as the other three, but still fun.

For the back, I used this fun dog print that Rose sent me. I just hated to cut it up, so I used the whole yard here to make a child smile! The chunk of gray matches many of the sashings on the front, and the strip of black matches the black polka dot binding. Easy peasy.

The one thing that I didn't do with these four quilts is name them. I know that's a bit odd for me. I just thought of them as "The Four I-Spies" and identified each one by color. I did hum the James Bond theme a lot while sewing, so perhaps they are agents 001 through 004.