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!

Green green green

It's Saturday and that's when Rainbow Scrap Challenge folks can link up their projects in this month's color. January 2020 is bright green, a hopeful color for folks living in the wintry parts of the world. Here in Florida, there's no shortage of inspiration.

The blocks above are simple "Mendota" 10-inch finished squares for the Sunshine guild. There's a bit of bright green in each one. I'm currently using these as my leader/ender project, so they quietly accumulate in the background.

This year, I'm expanding the RSC for myself, and thinking of it as the Rainbow Stash Challenge. I'm trying to use up more of my fat quarters, and this little top made a small dent in the greens. The lemons and oranges are my favorites! This one is the right size to donate to Wrap a Smile, just 40"x50". I'm hoping to quilt it this month and I'll share more closeups of the fabrics then.

I've also divided my big drawer full of Covered in Love orphan blocks into color batches, and this group was the clear choice for bright green. These blocks were left over from one of Kat's block drives last spring. I'll share more photos after I quilt it up. Meanwhile, Angel makes a rare fabric inspection appearance! 

In addition to RSC, I've challenged myself to use at least one of my theme fabrics per month. DH has volunteered to pull one out of the hat on the first of each month. January's randomly chosen theme is food. These panels of pasta fit the bill! Since the spaghetti panel background is green, I figured I could make it an RSC project, too, adding scrappy green and white checkerboard side borders. We've seen similar tablecloths in Italian restaurants, so it works, right? This one is sized to be a wheelchair quilt, 36"x48". It should quilt up quickly and a green binding will tie it up nicely.

And finally, I thought I'd share this pretty collection of threads I bought recently. Tula Pink curated it and most of the threads are subtly variegated. Doesn't it look like candy? I'm not usually a thread nut, but I keep taking these out and petting them.

Sharing with Angela on So Scrappy. Check out other fun RSC projects there!