Wrap A Smile

Happy Tuesday! Today I'm sharing two recent finishes I made for Wrap A Smile. This charity provides quilts for children undergoing cleft palate repair surgery. I shared this first quilt as a flimsy last month, when the RSC color was bright green.

My own theme for January was food, so this quilt uses some green fabrics with fruits and veggies. I had this backing already pieced for another project last year, so steered the top towards pinks and reds, too, to coordinate. 

For the quilting, I tried a motif that I saw on Cathy's blog, "squiggles and loops."

I didn't get a good photo of my quilting, so go check out hers!

The second quilt was made here in February. The RSC color is orange, and my own theme is cats. 

I pulled all the fun kitty fabrics I could find that had at least a little orange in them.

Then I cut squares of various bright orange blenders and made a simple patchwork design. 

The backing uses a large piece of orange, leftover bits from the front, and this super fun kitties-on-black chunk. Wiggly lines of quilting across the seams and scrappy orange binding finish it up.

And speaking of scrappy binding, I had an AHA! organizing moment recently. I usually cut my binding to 2.25" and then put the leftovers in my string bins by color. That's all well and good, but I also deliberately cut scraps to 2.5" for the string bin, and they are hard to tell apart. Then it occurred to me that I could put all the 2.25" binding pieces together in a single bin and they would always be right there, ready to sew together into scrappy binding. No need to separate by color, since there aren't so many to sort through. It's working really well: I've already made three bindings from the bin! Hooray for using scraps efficiently!