It's Been Awhile!

I've been busy finishing up baby quilts, quilts for charity and my floral challenge.  This quilt is one I did with my friend Dianne for Handmade with Love, a charitable group.

I finally finished all the quilting on the floral challenge quilt and I am very pleased with how it turned out.  I went with very little quilting in the flowers except in the centers.  It was a fun piece to make.  I just have to sew down the facings and put on the sleeve now.

This is a picture I took with my  phone of my computer screen.  I have had fun using Electric Quilt (EQ8) to diagram all the blocks minus one from the Farmer's Wife quilt books -- that is over 200 blocks altogether!  I didn't do the swastika block on principle.  It was fun trying to solve the puzzle with each block of whether they were nine-patches, four patches or something different.  

This quilt and the following ones are all baby quilts.  Three of them use those troublesome blocks I had in some different configurations!

They also used my newest shortcut which has changed my feelings about borders forever!!  I no longer attach borders to the quilt until AFTER I do the machine quilting in the center.  When basting, I leave a few inches on all sides of the backing and batting.  I have found that the borders look much, much better and flatter and never have to be measured to make sure they are the right size.  You just have to make sure the border is  longer than the side.  I then iron them firmly down before attaching the binding.

Each of these is 40 x 40 inches. Except for the last one, they are all hand dyes.  I washed the with white fabric to make sure there would be no bleeding and there wasn't any at all!

 

And Then There Were None Plus...

This was the last quilt made from those many many squares I had and I think it may be the most successful!  I entered it into our Club show.  I still have to put the aqua border around it and quilt it but I am committed now!  I am naming it "And There Were None".  This is just a simple "Disappearing Nine-Patch".

Our Quilter's By the Sea Guild here  in Wilmington is having a floral challenge and I do like to participate in these when I can and have an inspiration.  I was thinking the color of azaleas but certainly looking nothing like azaleas!  These are all my hand dyes and I am literally using real scraps for the background which will be a challenge.  The finished quilt has to be 24 in by 24 in. I have literally been grabbing leftover greens from various bags, some piece only a couple of inches long.  Every time I trim, I take the leftover pieces and piece them back together.

 

Here I was just auditioning the various greens to see if they looked okay.  I was also laying out the "flowers" to see how much space I had given the 24 in restriction.  All is good.

I have started piecing around the flowers here and do have even more done and it is slowly coming together!

Even more progress here and I have done a bit more.  Hopefully I will have the top done in a couple of days.  Then onto the quilting which will be another challenge but I think I know what I am going to do but won't rush it!

Once a month, I participate in a group that makes charity quilts and my friend Dianne makes up the kits.  There was an awful lot of familiar fabric in this one as I gave her all my Christmas fabric a couple of years ago!  Wouldn't you know, that was the quilt kit I picked to finish!

 

Using up Those Squares Little by Little

 

This was my first thought on how to use some more of these pesky 4 1/2 inch squares.  It was okay but I found the green and aqua to be too intense so decided to try another setting!

This might look a bit familiar as it was how I was originally going to set up one of the other baby quilts before I decided I didn't like it!!  I had to make four additional blocks so that it came out the way I wanted but these blocks are soooo easy.  Each block is basically a 6 in square when finished so there will be a border on this (or a couple of borders as I am thinking thin yellow and then wider green) but these will have to wait until after they are basted and quilted!

Agaiin, another use for those 4 1/2 squares and I think it turned out very successfully!  I had purchased a bolt of extremely extremely inexpensive white cotton from Marshall Dry Goods and used this for the white squares.  I am very pleased with the quality but felt I needed to wash it ahead of time which I don't usually do.  This will also have a border but I haven't decided what color yet.  I still have enough squares left to do two more baby quilts.  I am thinking I am going to do disappearing nine-patches using these squares, the white squares and aqua blocks in the middle of the nine-patches.  The aqua seems to go with all these different blocks.