Grateful

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I am grateful for the photographer who captured some of my quilts hard at work in Guatemala. What a special treat to see them comforting patients before and after surgery!

As you know, one of the charities that I donate to is Wrap-A-Smile, which provides quilts to Rotary-sponsored medical missions. The quilts are used on the operating table during surgery to keep the patients warm. The quilt wraps them up afterwards, too, and goes home with them. Most of the people receiving the free surgery are children, so I focus on making bright, happy quilts for them. In September 2019, Rotaplast had a mission in Guatemala City. And at least three of my quilts were there!



The two little I-spy quilts in the photo at the top of this post were made in fall of 2018. They traveled together to Guatemala. The blue one on was backed with a big dinosaur print that was given to me by Sean's aunt Graciella. If you click through to this photo, you can see those distinctive dinos folded up behind the doctor's back as he listens to the little boy's heart.



The pink quilt also has a unique backing: hot pink/magenta with bright jungle animals.



Recognize it? I sure did! This was the first photo I saw with one of my pieces and I admit there was shouting, and clapping, and even some happy tears. This patient looks to be a bit older than most and is probably a bit more worried, pre-surgery. I hope the procedure was successful and the recovery speedy!



As you can see, documenting the backs of the quilts here on Ye Olde Quilt Blogge can be vital to identifying them later. So I got really lucky on this next piece. The top was finished last fall, like the others, but I never took any photos of the finished quilt with its backing and binding.



It was made of crumb blocks alternating with these cute animal panels and sashed with a tiny black and white polka dot. Each animal is surrounded by an oval "frame."



And here it is, folded up under the shoulders of this child, post surgery. What a wonderful destiny for a funny little quilt! I hope it continues to bring you comfort, small person!

If you're interested in learning more about Rotaplast, you can read about their
current mission on their blog. Each mission is a little different, but the essence is the same. The quilts are a small part of a very organized process of bringing high quality surgical care to under-served populations.

I leave you with this photo from Guatemala, which is not of my quilt. But I love the smile on this cute girl! It captures what I hope for each of my donation quilts, that they will make a child happy. I'm so lucky to have the time and resources to spend hours doing a hobby that I love. And I'm grateful to the huge network of volunteers who bring these vital medical missions to distant countries. It feels good to be a small part of this important work!

Another RSC finish

 

Hello, quilty friends! Today I'm sharing two small pieces that were actually finished a few weeks ago. They have already been mailed off to Joyful Stitchers, who will give them away this holiday season. Each is about 36"x48" which is a good lap size for someone in a wheelchair. The narrow width helps keep the fabric out of the wheels.

The first one is made from one of my RSC block projects, Scrap Crystals. This is a Bonnie Hunter pattern that I reverse engineered. I think this complicated block really wants to be joined with, like, 20, of its buddies to really get the sparkly feel of the pattern. But after making six, spread out over 8 months or so, I wasn't feeling the love anymore. It was either stop at six, or make nine or twelve. Hm. Six it is.

To compensate for giving up before the full rainbow was achieved, I backed it with this fun nautical print. I hope someone will enjoy having this piece on their lap. There are certainly plenty of interesting scraps to peek at.

When I mail quilts off to charities, I like to pack the box nice and full. One little wheelchair quilt seemed insufficient, so I finished up this Scrappy Trips, too. Another Bonnie Hunter pattern, this one also wants many more blocks. I think that's true of pretty much all of Bonnie's designs! But once again, I wasn't feeling the motivation to sew up any more blocks, so another small piece it is.

The backing is a chunk of this cat flannel, which picks up a lot of the colors in the front. Plus: fuzzy kitties! What's not to love? And they are non-allergenic, to boot.

Meanwhile, we are now in an industrial boatyard having our bottom paint touched up. This yard doesn't normally work on pleasure boats, but builds and services large tow boats. So their lifting crane is GIANT. Our boat looks like a toy in their slings! The eight tires on this beast are each 10 feet in diameter. Yowza! It's a filthy yard, so taking quilt pics here is going to be a challenge.

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!

Giving Orphans a Home: Row, Row, Row your Boat

Welcome to part four of Giving Orphans a Home, where we talk about different ways to use orphan blocks in a quilt. Today I feature row settings for your orphans.

If you have just a few blocks in the same design, think about setting them in rows or columns. For Swooning in Pink, I was given the two big swoon/carpenter's star blocks. I knew they would make a great quilt center, but couldn't figure out how to make a medallion out of them. Setting them vertically and then surrounding them on all sides was going to make the quilt the wrong shape.

I had terrible lighting the day I took these photos; sorry about that! But you can get a glimpse of how soft and pretty the fabrics are in the stars. People have donated so many lovely blocks to Covered in Love!

In order to make the swoons fit the way I wanted, I needed rows. Fortunately, the selection of orphan blocks sent to me had some nice choices, like these triangles. Over on her blog, Kat says they came from this baby quilt she made. I'm tickled to find out the origins of these cute prints! They worked really well as a row. 

I also had just enough of the buzzsaw star blocks (no idea if that's a real block name!) for a row and to fill in between the swoons. There were enough pink and orange string blocks for two rows, but not enough for a border all the way around. That's OK, just having matching top and bottom still adds symmetry and purpose. With a little pink sashing, things started tying together and a quilt was born!

In order to make the central buzzsaw stars work, I had to trim them down just a smidge. Can you see that the lighter one is narrower than the purple one? This is an example of my Rule #2 that it's okay to do a bit of trimming to make a block work. After all, all orphans want to be useful!

The backing of this quilt is fun row house fabric in the same pinky-greeny-purpley-orangey colors, plus a strip of the pink dot also used for the binding. The quilting is a simple, loose stipple.

Hold onto your hats, this one is a wild ride! My batch of orphans didn't just include those soft pinks to "swoon" over. No, there were some really vibrant hot hot hot pinks and lots of turquoise, too. Throw in a little yellow and the ingredients for Diamond Glow were ready to sizzle.



This big center diamond arrived as a single piece, along with a slightly smaller sibling. I cut the smaller one into quarters and placed them around the big one to end up with a rectangle. These blocks have fabulous piecing; a big thumbs up to whoever made them! They make a great center medallion. Diamond Glow is kind of a medallion/row hybrid. The diamonds are obviously the central focus, but there's no complete surrounding "frames." Sometimes a few bits of symmetry and lots of bright color can make it work. And when in doubt, add a bit of interesting quilting!

Here are a few of the smaller blocks. Many were not quite standard sizes: 8.25" instead of 8.5", for instance. Some had cut off points. And some were seemingly perfect. I used sashing to get them to size.

The six Hunter's star blocks have very subtle internal contrast, so they give the top and bottom rows nice big blocks of turquoise. I zhuzhed up the texture on those with swirly quilting.

The back is just as wild 'n crazy as the front on this one! There were several blocks that fit the color scheme nicely, but didn't quite work as elements on the front. I think they make the back interesting, though. I especially like the turquoise star. It might have gotten a little lost on the front, but really shines here.

My final example of orphans in rows is much quieter, but my favorite of the three. Serene Neutrals uses a selection of blocks with scrappy neutral backgrounds and bold geometric shapes. Amazingly, each set of blocks was almost exactly the same width when sewn together; I think I only needed to fudge the final sizes about 2-3" to make them fit the longest row, the Majestic Mountain blocks. Also amazingly, the pops of color in all the neutral blocks were either orange, green, or dark blue. That's a great palette, don't you think?

Check out these hexagons! I only needed to add corner triangles to finish them up, and the one octagon in the center was exactly the right size to play along.

These HSTs with the lions and the orange ones at the other end of the quilt are clearly from the same fabric line. I made giant flying geese out of them and used them to add symmetry at top and bottom. They are echoed by the tiny orange flying geese below the hexagons, too. You can also see a little bit of the binding here. It is a VERY traditional blue and beige stripe, ancient of days. But the colors work and I like that it looks kinda scrappy when you can only see a little slice of it.

This row is just the coolest design! I've never seen this pattern of interlocking squares before, and it looks like it was a real challenge to piece. It came to me as an already sewn-together row and I love how it works in Serene Neutrals.

The back is just big chunks of more neutral fabrics. The overall floral quilting is almost invisible, just nice soft texture. And yes, those are VW buses in the upper left corner.

So there you go, three very different orphan block quilts, all using horizontal rows as the underlying design. Do you have any blocks that could work like this? I'd love to hear about it!

If you missed it, here are the first three parts of this series:

Part one: Introduction and Simple Sashing

Part two: Almost Enough Blocks

Part three: Medallions