I spy four four patch I spies

Today I have four little quilt finishes to share. I made them all at the same time as a single big project, starting with Val's I-spy square swap. 400 bright, happy novelty squares arrived in the mail, wowee! To tame that madness, I first sorted the squares into color families. I sewed four patches of two dark and two light values within a single color. Black, white and gray were lumped together. Then I bordered half of the four patch blocks with a light sashing in the same color family, and half with dark. So the final blocks each clearly "read" as a single color.

I ended up with more blue blocks than any other color, but the mix of subjects in any color wasn't particularly "boyish" or "girlish." That pleased me, since I wanted each quilt to end up with a nice mix of everything from dump trucks to butterflies, and they did.

These two quilts will be donated to Wrap A Smile. One is all the yellow, pink, and orange blocks. The second is some of the blue blocks, and most of the green and aqua blocks.  And that's a bit of downtown Boston in the background, looking mostly gray. It was a gloomy day, but the rain had washed all the salt (and seagull poop) off this slanted gunwale so it was clean enough for photos. Plus, the wind was minimal!

The back of the pink/yellow/orange quilt is a single piece of this fun hot pink animal fabric, and the binding is a pink stripe. Wrap A Smile's label is stitched right on top in one corner, before quilting.

The blue/aqua/green one has this super fun, large scale dinosaur print on the back that matches the front colors perfectly. The geometric binding looks like it's cut on the bias, but it isn't.  I need to have a much better idea of who will be impressed before I do bias binding. 

All four pieces were quilted with a big, loose stipple in a variety of kinda-sorta matching threads. That quilting motif is super fast for me and each quilt took about 40 minutes.

The other two quilts will be donated to Quilts Beyond Borders. This one uses all the purple blocks (there were only four,) plus red and blue. I left the cleat in the lower right corner of the photo for that jaunty nautical look. One of my online guild members, quipped, "I'm gonna have to get me a boat to use as a backdrop for my quilt photos!" All you really need is a cleat, Kathleen.

For the back, I went with red fabrics. Isn't that Siamese kitty fabric darling? I love that they are all napping on various red and orange quilts. The binding on this quilt is a red stripe, and I used another piece of that same fabric to join together the larger pieces on the back. This allowed me to easily piece in the QBB-required label, and it ties the back nicely to the front.

The final quilt is the last one I put together, with the remaining blocks. This is all the black/white/gray ones, plus a smattering of blue, green, aqua and red. Not quite as coherent as the other three, but still fun.

For the back, I used this fun dog print that Rose sent me. I just hated to cut it up, so I used the whole yard here to make a child smile! The chunk of gray matches many of the sashings on the front, and the strip of black matches the black polka dot binding. Easy peasy.

The one thing that I didn't do with these four quilts is name them. I know that's a bit odd for me. I just thought of them as "The Four I-Spies" and identified each one by color. I did hum the James Bond theme a lot while sewing, so perhaps they are agents 001 through 004.

Working on I-Spies

A couple of months ago, I participated in an I-Spy 4" square swap at Val's Quilting Studio. Each person sent in 20 squares each of 10 different fun novelty fabrics. Val then sorted and combined all the fabrics and sent us back 200 unique squares. So fun! There was also the option of sending in a double batch, which I decided to do. So I got 400 squares in the mail, super double bonus fun!

The problem with 400 (mostly) unique squares is that they are a bit overwhelming. Since the object of an I-Spy quilt is for there to be lots of different things for a toddler to find, the fabrics are busy busy busy. I needed some order in all that chaos!

I knew I wanted to make donation quilts for Wrap A Smile and Quilts Beyond Borders, so the first order of business was to remove some squares that contained subjects we've been asked to avoid. For instance, pigs, Christmas themes, and camouflage patterns aren't great choices in some of the receiving countries. At the same time, I sorted all the squares into color families and into lights and darks within the colors.

I stitched together four patches of two lights and two darks, all the same color. This made 7.5" squares, and I wanted the blocks to finish at 10" so I added 2" raw borders all the way around. The borders are the same color as the novelty squares, and that gave the whole batch some structure. Instead of hundreds of multicolor small squares, I ended up with just over 80 larger blocks, each one very clearly a single color. That's enough for 4 toddler sized quilts, each 40"x50".

Here are the stacks of red, yellow, orange and pink blocks. I tried to make about half the borders dark and half light. That was easy with some colors, like orange, where I had both deep pumpkin orange and light tangerine. For yellow and red, though, I used off white for the light borders. I don't have any pale yellow fabric, and pale red is pink, which ended up being its own color stack.

Here are the blue, green and aqua stacks. They are much larger, especially the blue. I ended up with 21 blue blocks, but only 5 yellow and 4 purple. And there's a stack of black and white blocks, too, with I-spy fabrics that had almost no color in them at all.

My original plan was to make rainbow order quilts, but with such a imbalance of colors that didn't seem like a great idea. Instead, I decided to group analogous colors. I think I'll end up with two bluish-greenish quilts, one yellow/pink/orange, and one with the leftovers mixed with the black and white squares.

And here's the first top pieced together! Even though this is a sort of soft and girly color palette, the I-Spy subjects are a great mix. There are dump trucks, bees, rhinos, fishing lures, strawberries, kitties, and treasure chests, just to name a few! I'm looking forward to piecing up the other three tops soon and then getting them all quilted.

And speaking of kitties, here's Angel on the other project I worked on last week. This is my scrappy Christmas fabric top, pieced up last year. I'm quilting it without batting to a fleece backing. Theoretically, without batting the quilt would be a little lighter and thinner and easier to store. We aren't usually any place very cold in the winter. However, the fleece that I bought online is the thickest stuff I've ever seen! Whoa, Nelly, this is going to be a heavy quilt! Just shoving it around through the Juki has been quite a workout, so I'm setting it aside for a while. 

A whole family of squirrels

It's time again to link up our DrEAMis/Squirrels with Sandra. Even though I don't usually have an agenda for what I sew on any given day, there are definitely projects that feel like DrEAMIs, where I Drop Everything And Make It. This stained glass looking top falls squarely in that category. I recently had pulled out this jelly roll of Nicey Jane fabrics because it was taking up awkward space in a box. Then Vicki and I were having a conversation about jelly roll patterns and as I browsed through my folder of free patterns, this Moda Bakeshop one called Noteworthy Labyrinth grabbed my attention. A little modification to the pattern and three days of concentrated sewing later, I had this top. 

There were a lot of different steps in the Bakeshop pattern and I felt like I could use a leader/ender project to go along with it. Mister Domestic had posted a fun quilt made with striped knit fabrics so I decided to make something similar. These are just simple 5.5" squares of various stripes, sewn into a basketweave design. It used up some scrappy stripey pieces that were too small to use as bindings. About 80% of the piecing was finished as leaders/enders by the time the jelly roll top was done, so it was practically a two-fer-one deal! Kind of a baby squirrel.

 

While I was selecting, ironing, and cutting my striped fabrics, I kept picking up and moving my box of dog-themed fabrics. That darn dog box was just constantly in the way! Only one thing to do about that: open it, pull some fabrics, and make 20 Mendota blocks with pooches, pups, and pugs. This one is destined for Wrap a Smile, and I've named it Squirrel Chases Dog. Another baby rodent skittering around my studio, tamed and tethered.

But wait! There's more! More dog fabrics, I mean. After using up most of the red, blue and brown dogs, there was a nice stack of greenish canine fabrics left over. I pulled a few green blenders and did a quick-n-dirty on-point layout. I don't love this one, but it was useful to figure out exactly what size blocks to cut to end up with the 40"x50" size Wrap A Smile prefers. This was my first test piece to get the 4/5 proportions correct. Next time I'll cut slightly smaller blocks and add a border to contain all the bias edges and give it more finished feel. Once I started thinking about the quilty math, my brain wouldn't stop chasing that nut hoarder. So this is little baby squirrel number three!

And finally, when Val announced her new Eye-Spy fabric swap, I just knew I had to participate. It's no secret that I love (and hoard) kid-friendly novelty fabrics. So I had plenty on hand to cut into the required 4" squares. To be part of the swap, you send in 20 squares each of 10 fabrics. Val collects them all, then redistributes them to all the participants and you get 200 unique squares back. So fun! There's an option to send in two sets and get 400 back, so I signed up for that in 5 seconds flat. Honestly? I could have easily pulled 40 unique novelties to swap, but Val is an elementary school teacher and knows how to make it fair for everyone. (Don't be piggy, Louise!) The selecting, ironing, and cutting took about 2 hours for little baby squirrel number 4. I think that counts as a whole litter of squirrel pups!