Rainbows Beyond Borders

Two of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilts were finished this week. They were both made from uneven rail fence blocks. The blocks are made using three strips 2.5"x8.5" in the monthly RSC color, and two strips 1.5"x8.5" in the next closest color on the color wheel. For instance, red blocks were made with skinny strips of either orange or purple. These blocks stitched up fast and used up a lot of my stash of scrappy strings!

This first one is laid out in rainbow order with scrappy black strips offsetting the blocks in each column. This makes the blocks kind of wiggle across the rows. I sized the black so that there was no seam matching on the color blocks. Why make it harder than it needs to be?

The backing is pieced together from some fun dog-themed prints. The white background fabric is flannel. 

The quilting is a sort of really large meander that looks a little like a topological map. The binding is rainbow trees on a black background.

The second piece is made from the same blocks on point and surrounded by white setting triangles. I really like the look of on-point quilts, but they are a PITA to make. Because I don't have a design wall and lay everything out on our bed, once the blocks are arranged they need to be completely sewn together before bedtime. Otherwise it's too hard to keep track of how all those diagonal rows go together.

My online guild, Sunshine, received a call from Quilts Beyond Borders to contribute quilts for the Navajo people. The quilts will be distributed in December, so I hustled to finish these two in November. The recipients will be mostly teens and adults, so the quilts needed to be a bigger than my usual QBB donations. In order to get this one the right size, I added a fun green border with a vegetable theme. The red tomatoes, purple eggplants and other veggies picked up various rainbow colors. I didn't have quite enough to extend that fabric into the binding, but found a brown and green dinosaur print that matched quite well, You have to really look closely to see the dinos, and I hope that makes someone smile.

I was in the mood for some fancier quilting with this one, so I did a dot-to-dot four lobed design in each block. It was fun to find matching threads in all the colors. And the texture is super yummy!

The backing on this one is a very cute cat flannel, fattened up with a chunk of green. So one cat quilt and one dog quilt for this go-round.

I think I ended up with only two extras of these RSC blocks, so they are resting quietly in the orphan block box for now. Meanwhile, lots of string scraps were busted with these two quilts, and they have been mailed off to find their forever homes!

Linking up to Angela's ScrapHappy roundup. Click through to see more Rainbow Scrap Challenge fun!