Monday's child

Monday's child is fair of face... 

Hm, maybe "happy" more than "fair." How about this face from the back?

That might be a face that only an orthodontist could love. At least it's fair to say that Monday's child will have a happy quilt, though:

Tuesday's child is full of grace... 

She's posing on the back of her pink and aqua quilt!

Wednesday's child is full of...whoa!

She'll be riding this cute horse made by Carol:

And whoa! Is this the other end of that horse, or just an abstract design?

Thursday's child has far to go...

It's a good thing she'll have all these vehicles!

A few boats couldn't hurt, either, IMHO.

Friday's child is loving and giving... 

How could she not be, with this block surrounded by love, and filled with her favorite things?

Also? Sleepy giraffe!

Saturday's child works for her living... 

Maybe she works on a farm.

Maybe she wrangles horses with Wednesday's child.

Maybe she wrangles kittens instead. What a great job that would be!

And a child that's born on the Sabbath day, is fair and wise and good and gay.

That kind of sounds like Superman to me!

I hope you've enjoyed this poetic presentation of seven little quilts. They are mostly made from lotto blocks that were sewn by members of the Sunshine Online Guild or donated to me. Do you recognize any of your blocks? 

Each finishes at 42"x42" and will be donated to Little Lambs as part of the Hands2Help Comfort Quilt Challenge. Do you have a favorite?

And because I document all the backs of my pieces, here they are:

Monday's back

Tuesday's back

Wednesday's back

Thursday's back

Friday's back

Saturday's back

Sunday's back

Have a great week!

Baby quilts

Happy Saturday! Why yes, this is the fifth day in a row that I've blogged. Thanks for noticing! No, I haven't been finishing quilts every day this week. I just had Deadly Blog Backup Syndrome. Turns out that sewing is more fun than writing about sewing. Who knew?

But you didn't tune in to read about blogging, now did you? Too meta. So let's talk quilts instead! Today's finishes are both for babies, so small and cute is the name of the game. The one at the top of this post is a gift for my niece and her third baby. He's due any day now.

When I asked for the nursery theme, she sent this Spoonflower fabric sample. I went looking for a paper pieced curled up fox, and found this one on Etsy. I really don't like paper piecing, and this darned fox reminded me why!

Fortunately, he turned out ok for such a sneaky guy.

For the trees, I've always wanted to try Bright Birch Trees by Crazy Mom Quilts. Someone did a tutorial on the pattern a while ago, and I had that saved on my computer. Instead of doing bright trees, I stuck with black, white and gray scraps for a more natural look. Well, if you consider little anchors embedded in the bark "natural."

A soothing navy backing with little moons will hopefully help baby to snooze. My niece and her family live in Colorado, so I'm calling this one "Sleepy Fox in the Aspens." (Birches, aspens, they're all skinny stripey trunks, right?) It has arrived safely and is brightening up the nursery now.

I made this second baby quilt during Sandra's Beothuk Star quilt along last summer. In a fit of over achievement, I cut fabric for two of the design. The second set of HSTs sat quietly in a baggie until January of this year. Using the colors from butterflies in the center star, I chose purple, green and orange accent fabrics. 

When all the blocks are premade, a quilt comes together quickly! Swirly quilting makes it soft and snuggly. And at 42" square, a single piece of this fun orange kangaroo design makes a fast backing and easy binding. Coincidentally, the first Beothuk quilt was given to my other niece's baby! This one, however, has been donated to Little Lambs Foundation.

Fireburst, Fundy and Strings

My final three finishes for 2018 are ready for their big reveal. The first is my Fireburst quilt, made during Tish's quilt along. 

Tish published clear, step by step instructions each month to make a quilt in one of two sizes. I chose the baby size, with a final block size of 32" x 32". I added a simple border to bring it up to 37" square.

It was really fun to watch my piles of navy, baby blue, and orange morph into this bursting star design!  So cool.

I used some wool batting scraps and a pieced backing, and quilted it up with floppy feathers. The result is a super light, but fat and poofy quilt.

I'll be donating this to Little Lambs, which is located in Utah and serves childen in the foster care system. I figure the wool will make it nice and warm for a small person who could use a quilty hug.

The second piece was made using the Fundy Skies pattern by Cannuck Quilter. Joanne asked me to be a pattern tester for the baby size, which is a single block. I pulled out some red, navy, gold and gray fabrics to play with. 

The pattern was really easy to follow, and I love this on-point square shape! However, the fabrics I chose didn't feel very baby-ish.  Hm, what to do? I had some small panel blocks in a lighthouse theme, so I added those to the top and bottom of the Fundy block to make the quilt a rectangle.

Fundy Lighthouses finishes at about 36" x 50", which is a great wheelchair quilt size. The narrow width keeps the quilt from getting caught in the wheels, but it is still long enough to warmly cover an adult's lap. I used the rest of more wool batting to keep is light and cozy, and quilted it with a medium stipple using variegated blue and white thread. 

The thread is really pretty on the spool, but I feel there was too much contrast between the darkest and lightest parts of the variegation. In the future I'll look for more subtle shading for that type of thread. 

With the nautical lighthouses and the patriotic colors, perhaps this quilt will appeal to a Navy vet.  I'll send it to my friend Doris, and her guild in Alabama will pass it along to a nursing home.

And here's the final finish for 2018. I've been making string blocks each month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I love them! It's so satisfying to turn a jumbled pile of miscellaneous strings into neat, tidy blocks. 

However, I used fabric foundations for the stitching, so the blocks turned out double thickness and quite heavy. Rather than make a complete, but heavy quilt, I decided to donate this 50" x 70" top to Victoria's Quilts. They will quilt it up with a warm flannel backing and give it to a person in Canada who is living with cancer. I figured it's cold enough up in the neighborly north for a super heavy quilt to be useful.

And here is an early glimpse into some things I've been playing with lately. I bought a mini Quick Curve Ruler to try some new curvy blocks. Isn't this a fun shape? It's supposed to be a Christmas ornament, but I used a charm pack of pretty metallic pastels and has a different feel. Sort of Moorish.

I also delved into my neutrals and brights string scraps and made some rectangular blocks using paper foundations. I don't want to end up with another set of double thick, heavy string blocks with fabric foundations. I really like  the wonky diamond shapes but the paper bits are annoying.  I was tickled to read that Diann of Little Penguin Quilts is also making rectangular/diamond string blocks, and hers look so great in red and cream. So interesting how an idea like this seems to pop up in multiple places at once!

I ain ga lie...

...my blogging mojo has been lacking. But I have been sewing. The title of this post is a nod to the local Turks and Caicos beer. The lager is called I-Ain-Ga-Lie ("I ain't gonna lie") which is delicious. We enjoyed a couple of cold ones on the deck of a restaurant on the island of Middle Caicos. You can see both shallow, turquoise water and deep, marine blue water in the background. Lovely!

A stack of long quarters in sherbet colored homespuns has been kicking around my studio, getting in the way, so I cut them up and pieced this top. I was inspired by Rose's Ernie quilt for the combo of solids and stripes, and wanted to try a little bit of transparency play. I offset the solid and pattern rows by a half block, which was a bit fiddly and tedious to keep track of. I think this quilt is one of those that will look a lot better quilted and I'm planning to play with some fun long skinny FMQ motifs when I get around to it.

And speaking of transparency, I pieced up this Five Alarm Chili top using Sandra's Playtime Plus pattern. She's having a quilt along that just started so feel free to jump in! The piecing went really fast so I got ahead of the QAL even faster than usual. I chose mostly hot chile pepper fabrics for the small pluses, with a few other veggies and blenders for variety. The cream and red solid backgrounds make another ginormous red cross, a nod to our years as volunteers for the American Red Cross. Or possibly it refers to the medical attention you'll need if you eat cousin Christopher's homemade hot salsa.

While taking photos, the wind gusted up quite strongly and I ended up hanging onto the corner of the chiles while it flapped noisily. I didn't notice until later that all the motion had actually started to disintegrate the fabric! Good thing I have more of this cream so I can replace this frayed corner.

This little piece isn't a quilt, technically. There isn't any batting between the top and the backing, so I'll call it a blankie. The fabrics are the fun, fish-themed scraps from Hugs and Kishes Covered with Fishes that I made for my newest baby cousin. I actually pieced the top at the same time as H&KCwF, so it's nice to move this UFO along. The backing is a thick cotton corduroy in similar colors, and I used pre-packaged satin blanket binding. It is quilted using wavy lines of stitching about 2" apart. The corduroy didn't slide well along my machine bed, so I ended up quilting most of it with the corduroy on the top, using my walking foot. I'm calling it Through the Reef and we'll see how it washes up. I'm hoping the corduroy will shrink up and add some crinkle.

Similarly, this piece is just the top with a flannel backing, no batting, and purple satin binding. Streak of Lightning was pieced ages ago with the scraps from our bed quilt, which is the big checkerboard one in my blog header photo. It's been languishing as a UFO for several years but now it's a finish! Woot!

Here's the backing, a cute blue giraffe flannel with a bit of green to make it big enough. The quilting on this one is kind of a FMQ sampler with 8 different motifs in the 16 rows. Without the batting thickness, the fabric moved much more smoothly/quickly under my quilting foot, which led to some distorted shapes. It's funny how my hands are so used to the drag and resistance of a regular quilt sandwich! I think all the cottons will shrink in the wash and hide any little oopsies. Again, I decided to use satin binding to give it a little extra pizzazz to make up for no batting.

I had to pull out my other sewing machine to put on the satin bindings because that requires a zig zag stitch. Once I had The Little Kenmore That Could set up, I figured I might as well use up the rest of my stash of satin binding. I had nice big pieces of this pink giraffe flannel and a coordinating cotton pique, and put them together as a whole cloth blankie. Kind of like a receiving blanket, but big enough for a toddler who really, REALLY likes pink. 

These blankies will be donated to Little Lambs as part of the Hands2Help challenge. Little Lambs provides a backpack full of hygiene and comfort items to kids who are in transition from temporary places like hospitals, emergency shelters, and foster care. These children can be any age from newborn to teens and often have no way to carry their few belongings. I got to thinking that the really little kids might struggle to fold and pack a bulky quilt into their new backpack, so I decided that these thinner blankies might be a good alternative. The flannel and corduroy are soft and fuzzy and the satin bindings feel smooth and soft against little fingers and faces. Although I prefer making quilts with batting, it was interesting to try these alternatives and I think they will still wrap three little ones in warmth and comfort.