More little quilts for little people

Baby and toddler quilts are just the most fun to make, aren't they? Here are three more that I finished recently. These penguins on parade were made with orphan blocks that I won as part of another blogger's give away. I'm sorry to say I can't find her contact info, alas. So let's just concentrate on how stinkin' cute those blocks are! I added scrappy blue and yellow strips and bits to fill in the background.

Here's a close-up of one of the dapper little guys and a peek at the back of the quilt. This one will probably go to Little Lambs as part of the Hands2Help challenge.

The next two quilts have both been sent off to Quilts Beyond Borders. This one is made from charm squares and a little orange background fabric. That same orange is the binding, too. The bright fabrics feature butterflies and various smiling bugs, giraffes, and peapods. Yes, peapods.

The back uses up some older yellow and green fabrics. I include the backings, even rather uninteresting ones, to help me remember what they look like. Sometimes the charities will share photos of children with their quilts, and all that shows is the backing, so it's helpful to document them.

The third quilt started with some HSTs that were given to me by Jan, The Colorful Fabriholic. The pretty browns and golds reminded me of a Laurel Burch horse panel I had tucked away.

I've loved Laurel's works for years, wearing her jewelry designs back in the 80's. I had no idea she also designed fabric until I became a quilter! I've been hoarding this panel for a while, and needed a little nudge to use it up. Many thanks to Jan for providing the blocks that inspired this little piece.

This fabric covered with horses is perfect for the back, don't you think? I scored a large lot of it that had been sewn into curtains. After unpicking a few seams and trimming off some faded areas, I ended up with several nice chunks. I hope a horse loving child enjoys this quilt!

Rainbow Scrap Challenge finishes

At the end of 2020, I finished up two RSC quilts. The blocks were made over the last several years, using up strings and crumbs. I find those types of scrap blocks a little chaotic unless I make them in a single color. This quilt is made from string blocks pieced on foundation paper. Since most junk mail is 8.5"x11", I cut the paper into 8.5" squares and trim the final block to that size, too.

I generally start my string block with a dark strip, say navy blue, then fill in one half of the square with darker shades of blue and the other half in lighter blues. Four blocks made like that can be put together into these diamonds. Since red and pink are two different RSC months, I separated them. Pink blocks use dark/hot and light/baby pinks. Red blocks use mostly red strips for the dark side, and neutrals with a little bit of red for the light side. There's a black and white block, too.

On the back of this quilt, I tried to match less-loved fat quarters in the same color as the block directly opposite on the front. I was mostly successful, but I doubt anyone would ever really notice. Mostly it just looks like a collection of rather ugly fat quarters!

The second quilt is made with crumb blocks. I seem to have lots and lots of crumb blocks, so rather than use all colors of the rainbow, I stuck with purple, pink and yellow in an ombre.

Each block has a sashing strip of black on two adjacent sides, and this sort of tumbling offset look is easy to achieve. Lots of fun little bits and bobs among the crumbs!

The back is also purple, pink and yellow. Both quilts were finished in late December 2020, and donated to Quilts Beyond Borders. 

Around the same time, we were anchored in West Palm Beach, Florida. At the local mall, there is an artificial tree with color-changing LEDs on each "leaf." The leaves slowly change colors in various patterns. The effect is spectacular! Here it is in red.

And here it is in rainbow. I've never seen anything like this before and we visited The Tree several times while in town. It's mesmerizing!

Robin the Panda

Hello, quilty friends! It's been a while, hasn't it? I took a little vacation from blogging, but not from sewing, so I have some finishes to share with you. This piece is Robin the Panda. 

Robin is named after the way he was created, as a round-robin group effort. Five members of the Sunshine Online Quilt Guild, including me, added something to Robin's little world. 

I made the center block and then shipped it across the country to another person. She added the forest at Robin's feet. Then the bamboo stalks and appliqued leaves to each side were made by another person. 

Then a black and white striped border was added. Then the darling bear paw print blocks were added. A purple outer border framed it all up.

After the fifth round, it was returned to me for quilting and binding. Some of the purple fabric was sent to me by the final participant, and I used it as part of the pieced backing.

Robin the Panda was donated to Quilts Beyond Borders, one of the charities that Sunshine supports. I hope he makes a child happy! It was super fun to be part of a round robin. Have you ever sent blocks or a partially finished quilt to someone else for something like this?

Scrappy Quilts Beyond Borders

Hello, friends! Today I'm sharing three little finishes for Quilts Beyond Borders, all made from my ever-growing scrap piles. This ziggedy-zaggedy one was made with 3.5" strips and squares in blues, greens, and purples. I must have been channeling Sandra since those are her signature colors! I had a hankering to use my Tri-Recs ruler and saw this block pattern...somewhere. 

If I were a better quilt blogger, I would keep meticulous notes on where I found the pattern and would share a link with you in case you wanted to try it. But alas, I'm not great at keeping track. I kinda quilt from the hip, to be honest. If I find the pattern again (I can picture it in my head!) I'll come back and link it here.

Meanwhile, here's a close up of the design. It consists of triangle-in-a-square blocks that alternate with squares, and it used lots of scraps! I quilted it with squiggly lines running along the zigs and zags, cream thread in the lights and turquoise thread in the darks.

The back is this cool fabric in the same colors that I've been holding for just the right quilt. I love it! The finished size is 42"x50", a little smaller than most QBB quilts. It will be going to a child in foster care and the compact size fits easier into a backpack.

The next quilt is this funky, scrappy herringbone design. It is made from 4.5"x12.5" strips that are pieced together using partial seams. The good news: I did keep track of where I learned this technique. It was from this video. The bad news: it was a PITA (pain in the ankle) and I can't really recommend it!

I suppose if you really LOVE partial seams, you could give it a try. But I found it kind of tedious and never did figure out a good way to iron the seams properly. That being said, it makes an interesting design and I'm glad I did it. Once. It's hard to be too unhappy with a quilt that has herds of zebras in it, right?

To quilt it, I did some rough and ready feathers that followed the back and forth shapes of the herringbone. Since the scraps were already trimmed to the 4.5" width, this blue dinosaur fabric ended up saying "hump" instead of "thump" in several places. If this ends up in the hands of a 11 year old boy, there might be snickering.

However, the backing made of pink kitties and yellow mushrooms might push it a bit too far into girlie territory. 

The last quilt is made of 2.5" squares and strips. The design is from a short quilt along by...someone. Oh, dear. I've completely lost track of whose blog it was on. I'd love to give her credit but I just can't find it again. Does it look familiar to anyone? It was another great scrap buster and went together fast and easy.

The back of this one might be more appealing to that 11 year old boy, with a truck theme. I have no idea where I got these monster truck and bright construction equipment fabrics, but aren't they fun?

Here's the entire back. Almost as scrappy as the front! The quilting is simple diagonal lines through each block, using my walking foot. The more free motion quilting I do, the less I like using the walking foot. It's sooooo much slower and causes more puckering. But for long straight lines, it is the tool of choice.

We've moved on from this dock in Virginia and are now moving south through a rather remote part of North Carolina. This will post automagically while we're probably out of internet coverage, so if you don't hear back from me for a few days after you comment, don't worry!

And speaking of comments, lately I've been getting more "no reply" commenters, which means I do not have access to your email address. That means I can't reply directly back to you when you kindly leave comments here. Cindy, you said you spotted one of your blocks in my quilt. That's so neat! I'd love to chat with you about that but I don't have your email address. Annie, you asked about how I receive mail. I wrote about that on this post, if you want to check it out. You can learn more about no-reply commenters here.

 

Three for the Navajo Nation

Today's finishes were all made for the charity Quilts Beyond Borders. As one of their many initiatives, each year around Christmas they distribute quilts to people living on Navajo lands.

While many of the folks receiving QBB quilts are children, the Navajo ones are also distributed to adults. So these pieces are a little bit larger than usual. I made this one after seeing a photo of a similar quilt. It's two sizes of HSTs, set so the lights and darks make a criss-cross pattern.

The fabrics are modern, yet fun, and include stars, cats, lemons, fish and other random whimsies.

The back is this nice leaf fabric in primary colors on white, plus some scraps from the front. The leaves are fancy organic cotton, but I bought yardage for a song on eBay. It should get softer and cuddlier with each washing!

The second quilt is the pattern Magic Stars. I first saw this fun design on Joy's blog when she featured a tutorial by Tiffany. It's a great way to use a layer cake, and I had this fun batik set in purple, orange and turquoise. I also had a swirly purple and orange fabric that made a pretty border to get the size right for an adult lap.

The Magic Stars look like a child's drawing of the sun to me, so I emphasized that with quilting. Swirls in the center and dot-to-dot triangles around the sun rays.

The pattern made 10 big star blocks, which is an awkward number. So I set nine of them in a square layout and put the tenth on the back with some coordinating purple fabrics.

I was quite happy with that backing, right up until I was basting the quilt sandwich and realized it was just a smidge too small. How big is a smidge? About as wide as these tiny strips of purple on one edge. That's how much more I needed to add, sigh. You can see the fun purple and orange plaid binding in this photo, too.

And finally, this quilt is an eBay bonus buy. While looking for larger chunks of yardage to use as backings, I found a listing for about 20 yards of chambray, red bandana print, and red/black check. Perfect! Also included were some 12" blocks made of the same fabrics. Well, heck, I can use those, too! All I had to do was add sashing, cornerstones and borders and this little quilt just sewed itself.

Many of the blocks also included this running horse print. This block included most of the horse, but several stand alone horse butts are also featured. I hope that will amuse the recipient as much as it did Sean!

I used some of the chambray and bandana for the backing, and the binding is the check. I have tons of all three left over for more backings. Even though these fabrics were probably originally from the late '90s/early 2000s, the designs are timeless.

So there you go, three quite different quilts heading west to provide warmth, comfort and perhaps some entertainment. Which one is most your style?

Mendotas in paradise

Hello, hello! I teased you with this photo last week, and today I'm going to tell you more about this little quilt.

My online guild, Sunshine, calls these offset square-in-a-square blocks "Mendotas," after the retreat location where we used them. Even though the retreat is over and we are now working on "Eugene" Oregon blocks, I had a lot of pieces already cut in Mendota sizes. 

I'm also choosing a theme each month, and February was "cats." So I decided to pull all the cat-themed Mendotas and see what I had. This sweet tuxedo kitty in a knit hat looks like our much-missed George. 

Most of the kitty fabrics I already had cut were pink/red, black and turquoise. So I added enough new blocks in those colors to get a fun mix. And since I finished the quilt in March, it even fit with the latest RSC shades, aqua/teal/turquoise!

Not every block has a cat in it, unless these little cars are all going to the vet. You can probably get a cat to the vet on a bicycle, too, but I wouldn't recommend it.

And it's a stretch to get cupcakes and mushrooms to fit with cats, but hey, some child will enjoy the fun fabrics, right? 

Uh-oh! Good thing these dogs aren't right next to the cats on the left. I quilted this in Unitarian Fans (a much more liberal version of Baptist Fans). You can see the roughly parallel curves on the doggie fabric. I forgot how fun that motif can be if you take a relaxed, unmarked approach.

The block in the lower right is my favorite: silly cats surrounded by sailboats. Sounds like Angel's life!

The backing is a pink with abstract cat heads, and the binding is a solid-reading hot pink. This quilt will be donated to Quilts Beyond Borders. We have very limited fresh water here, and the mail system is not reliable. So washing and shipping will wait until we get back to the US.

In other news, I had "one of those days" recently. First, I went to iron the binding for a Covered in Love quilt, and discovered that I somehow flipped one piece over. How could I have not noticed that?

So I took it back over to my Juki, where I had just finished several free-motion quilting sessions. I expected to have to reset the machine from FMQ (feed dogs down, stitch length zero, presser foot pressure low) back to regular stitching to fix the binding. Um, it's already in regular mode? That means I quilted an entire quilt with loops and swirls and la-de-das with the feed dogs chugging away underneath and the hopping foot under full pressure. But did I notice even a tiny difference? Nope. Either I'm losing my mind, or the Juki has just taken over without any input from me.

Then later when I went back to finish pressing the binding, I managed to set my iron down flat on the cutting mat. Oh, yuck! What a mess, and what a stink! Sean did a great job cleaning up the iron, but that's the second mat I've ruined this year. Fortunately, it's only one corner, so I flipped it over and that warped area is not in my cutting "sweet spot."

On a more positive note, did you see Joy's post on the Magic Square block? As soon as I finished reading it, I pulled out a well-aged batik layer cake and started cutting. The blocks are so quick and easy that I had the whole batch finished within a few hours!

Even trimming the blocks to their final size was fast. Don't you love a pretty pile of trimmings? The blocks are sitting in a project bag (recommended by Sarah, available on Amazon) and I'll be trying different layouts this week. This will be one of my quilts for the Hands2Help Comfort Quilt Challenge.

I have more finishes to share with you soon, plus I'll show you how to tell the depth of the water here by color AND show pics of my quarantine haircut. Can you guess who wielded the scissors??