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.

Amanda's Quilt -- A Beatiful and Simple Way to Use Up Those Scraps

Combine a snazzy border technique, some creative applique and oodles of already cut block and you can have a lovely quilt almost like this.

S has been making quilts for each person in her husband's family. This jewel is for a sister. She loves blues and deep, rich colors so we began by choosing a color pallet and then hitting the 3 1/2" square stash.

We started with a 16 x 16 block center. It was edged with a white and dark brown sawtooth strip. Each of the four corners start with 14 block and 2 triangles decreasing one block on each side per row. It is also edged with the sawtooth strip on its long side. S created the quilt's showpiece by designing a flowing, flowering vine that twists on and off the work. It even incorporates an initial.

Getting there. How about adding a bit more length and choosing borders?

To make the quilt a little longer, we added a strip of matching fabric. A small, dark colored border popped the center a bright outer border finished the quilt top. Since the back featured an oriental print (see below), we decided to also use one for the border and the length extention.

Things had gone alone quite smoothly, to this point but we were soon to face quite the challenge. S had planned to gift it at Christmas. We had an appointment to use the long arm the December 19th. Plenty of time! Or so a person would think. Something bad happened the evening before to the bobbin assembly and the other machine was taken. I took the offer of a later date and the suggestion that we prepare the binding in advance.

R and I returned on Christmas Eve and got busy. She quilted this one first, using a ferny leaves and flowers pattern. We thought it needed some curves to balance the square blocks.

The minute it came off the long arm, I sewed the binding in place and sat down to hand stitch the second side down while R and S quilted two other quilts, the firefly baby quilt and a Halloween lap quilt.

It was ready by morning. Merry Christmas, A!

Everything Little Boy Quilt

Frogs, water, kites, fish...everything little boy. This quilt has them all set in a snowball pattern and surrounded by tiny, bright squares.

Here are a couple individual blocks. You can see my quilting. I did it on my sewing machine and think it turned out pretty good.