Rainbows and Dinosaurs

Here's a scrappy quilt; a perfect way to use up tons of those squares you cut from scraps in a moment or hour or week of craziness. My grandson and I began this quilt with a dig through those squares. He was three. He'd helped finish the quilt for his bunk. This one would be for his baby brother's bed in a couple years. His mom and I decided to make a could more rows, but arrange them in groups of two just so the two would be a bit different.

Quilting with small children poses its own set of problems and its own opportunities for joyful giggles. Attention span might be shorter and your little one may exhibit the "oh shiny!" syndrome. If your partner in sewing lives on the other side of the world, it can be even more of a challenge.

We began by sorting out colors from the 2 1/2 inch square bin and sending pictures of the target color back and forth via email. Rowan would makes suggestion as to which block should come next and which had to sit next to each other. Over a few weeks, we put together rows for most of the colors in the rainbow. These rows were sewn together and just waiting for me to find a good sash fabric. Turns out it was a good thing that it sat on the shelf a couple months.

The first sign of a problem sailed in with a shipping company's ship.  The companion quilt, also a rainbow quilt arrived in Sweden. It was made of 3 1/2 inch strips...so instead of a mere 27 blocks per row, we now needed 39. Sigh. It's a good thing that my seam ripper and I are buddies. Adding more blocks often meant taking bits and pieces apart to improve balance between prints and shades.

The quilt also needed a bit of  redesign to expand the width. As it was, the sash strips were about the same width as the rainbow strips. It lacked interest visually. After brainstorming, we decided to border each set of blocks with a matching border. That added enough with to use a 2-inch sash.

An really Old Family Quilt

Well maybe just an old family quilt. Grandma J. made this quilt a long long time ago the 1940s  (I think, could be wrong about the date). This quilt was on family beds for years and now resides in the family vacation cabin still on family beds. Grandma J would not have won any quilting awards. Like herself her quilts were quirky. She was not a fan of the saying measure twice cut once. She was more of a measure, well guess the size cut and if it isn't the right size cut again or add another piece. It was a quilt you were making, you were going to sew it together anyway. If you look closely at the stars in this quilt you will see that not a single point matches quit right and all the squares are different. In fact I think the crazy quilt pattern was her favorite for making start. She made quite a few in this general pattern. And every one of them is fun, colorful and not quite perfectly square. Even After Grandma A. spend a long time in the 1960s trying to get the points to match up. Grandma A was a firm believer in the measure twice saying.