Give a Little, Part One

I spent this past Saturday with some friends from my quilting guild, making quilts to donate to Project Linus.  We do this almost every month.  It's a team effort to produce a quilt.  There are usually different people involved in the various steps along the way - from donating the fabric, to making blocks, choosing different blocks to put together, piecing them, quilting and binding.  It makes us feel good to spend time together, laugh, learn from each other, and best of all, create quilts that will hopefully be of comfort to others.

Today we're going to look at some of the projects I worked on. 

 

I made this quilt top out of my own stash, with fabric that I bought many years ago.  You know how that goes.  If you don't use it right away when you love it, it's probably going to just take up room for years until you make a conscious effort to use it.  It was so scrappy, that I was having a hard time arranging the blocks in a manner that appealed to me.  Finally I settled on grouping like colors together.   I added a border to bring it to twin-size.

This was a popular block last year in our Project Linus quilts.  We called it the "Kleenex Box" block.  Each block is 6" x 12".

 

This top is a variation on the "Kleenex Box".  Pieced blocks are intermingled with unpieced 6" x 12" blocks.  None of this fabric is mine, nor did I make the blocks.  Other guild members made them out of their scraps, then I pulled the ones that had similar jewel-tones to go with the "confetti" looking fabric.

No border on this one.   I'm not a fan of borders and I got the word that it was OK to make them smaller than twin size.  That made me happy!!!!

 

Somebody donated the blocks in row 1, column 2 and row 3, columns 1 & 4 - french horn fabric.   Also the two blocks with black borders - you can't tell from this photograph but those are musical notes.  I knew those had to go into the same quilt, but needed more fabric!!  No problemo.  I made a quick shopping trip to JoAnn Fabrics where I found the penguins and the grey fabric with notes.  At Hobby Lobby I found the yellow/grey/black circular fabric which I reasoned must be penguin eggs.  The other blocks were pieced from my stash.

I love this quilt top - it has a Happy Feet vibe.  Maybe I should watch that movie.

The "beachy" fabric you see in the center of the blocks was donated.  With all the white space on it, it wasn't a good candidate to cut into small pieces.  There wasn't a lot of it either, so I cut 6-inch squares and used some other donated fabric for the green borders.  The sashing is from my stash.

Again, this is the stage it was in (quilt top only) before I handed it off for quilting and binding. 

 

This was my project last Saturday.  I decided this year to make completed projects - quilting and binding included.  I wanted to make something quick and cute so I decided on a reversible wholecloth quilt.  This is the front.   Cute fabric donated by a friend of mine!  For quilting, I sewed horizontal lines between each row of the alphabet.

This is the back, donated by another guild member, as was the "sky" fabric used for the binding.  You can see the quilting stitching here.   I machine stitched the binding and was pleased how nicely it turned out.  The first time I tried to do that years ago, it looked good on the front, but the back stitching was all over the place - sometimes on the binding and sometimes on the quilt back.  Not pretty.  I don't know why but this time the stitching on front and back was perfectly aligned.  I'm going to use machine binding on all my Project Linus quilts in the future.  It's nice and sturdy and looks good.