Happy in Pink

I have finished my latest Baby quilt, Happy in Pink. I am really pleased with it. I have been working on this quilt for the past couple of months in between using up lots of scraps to make RSC blocks of various kinds.

Each Happy block is different, but very pink and girly! Lots of fun looking through my scraps for the 5" centres and the various strips to frame them. I found a lovely piece of fabric in my stash which was exactly right for the backing.  Bought several years ago (the selvedge dates it at 2011) that I have auditioned SO many times for a quilt backing and it has never seemed "just right".  It was this time.  There is such a variety of pinks in the quilt, yet more shades of pink adds to the mix and makes a lovely backing.  Binding, again from stash, is a bright pink with tiny white dot which seems to bring all those pinks together.

My friend's daughter is now 25 weeks pregnant so if the baby if a girl, this is the quilt for her.
The quilt measures 37" square and is a mixture of machine and hand quilting.

 

Two close ups of some of the blocks:

 

 

And finally, the lovely backing!

 

 

Linking to RSC 2017

As I didn't have any orange scraps to make more RSC blocks I'm linking to So scrappy blog with my trial layout for my Twinkler Quilt.  I have been making these blocks for the past six months or so and decided I probably had enough to make a quilt. There are Orange blocks in there!

 

I might change out some to the blue and pink blocks for some other colours as I have 30 Twinklers over.

Creating Soy Amado blocks

I didn't have any orange scraps left for the RSC 2017 Challenge ( totally cleared out last weekend!) So I turned to 4 unfinished Log cabin blocks made on a printed foundation calico gifted to me a couple of years ago. One of our Patchwork Group members was having to clear her home as she was going into care and everyone was given a bag of bits and pieces. I recently used some of the gifted Cute cats squares in my baby quilt called Happy Cats.

Two of the Log cabin blocks had been sewn together using a tiny swirly flowery garland machinery embroidery stitch. The stitches were minute and took me all Friday evening to unpick.  However, yesterday I turned them into Soy Amado blocks by adding two more rounds to each Log cabin. Struggled a bit to find suitable colours.  They aren't a perfect choice but I did use up more scraps.

 

These blocks need to finish at 12.5" exactly so I always make them much larger, around 14" which allows for quilting and trimming to size.

 

I have sandwiched them with batting and backing so they are ready for machine quilting which I'll do at my Quilt Group on Monday afternoon.

Trial layout

I finally had a little time for sewing this afternoon but decided to see how many blocks I had for a Twinkler Quilt.  I intend to make this a donation quilt for Siblings Together. The minimum size they require is 50" square so I worked out if I set my Twinklers 9 blocks by 9 that should finish at 54" square. I don't really enjoy making larger quilts, quite hard to sandwich together without getting lots of wrinkles so this size is good for me.

So a quick layout looked like this:

Adding this picture to Busy Hands, Finished or Not Friday.

All the blocks need trimming - horrid job so I'll tackle the blocks a few at a time. I probably should have trimmed them as I went along!

I even have 30 blocks left over, useful for swapping if I feel some of the blocks in this current Trial Layout are too similar.

I also counted up how many 5" String blocks I have made - 105.

I have made a note of how many of each colour I need to make to be able to sort them into sets of 4 for each block. Not too many.

It's amazing how these Projects using scrap blocks mount up.

RSC Orange and others

I have been making a few blocks whenever I found a few minutes during the past few days.

First of all, so I can link to So Scrappy RSC Orange challenge
with these Orange blocks:

And other assorted blocks:

 

 And earlier in the week I made another Sailboat block for our Patchwork Group joint quilt :

I am enjoying making a few blocks for various different quilts and building up blocks to make  some quilt tops.

7 year old's First Quilt finish

My 7 year old Granddaughter was very keen to make a little quilt so during the summer holiday she made this dolly quilt with my help:

I tipped out my box of 2.5" squares and she chose 20 and arranged them in a 4 x 5 pattern.
I was surprised which colours and fabrics she picked - I thought she would go for pinks and lilacs and was amazed at the ones she chose, especially the black tone on tone one and the white daisy on a navy background ( she liked that so much she added 3 of those!).

I showed her the basics of the machine and she operated the footpad whilst I guided the fabric. She managed really well. Border and backing fabrics were chosen from a more restricted selection from my larger pieces stash. Again she surprised me as she immediately wanted the borders and backing to be the same fabric. She chose the binding from the same selection.  We put the borders on together in the same way as we sewed the squares and rows together - I helped her pin the rows and showed her how they nested.

After I sandwiched the top, batting and backing she chose buttons from my button box and we drew a chart so she knew which button she wanted where on the quilt.  Then she learned how to sew on buttons, took quite a time, in several short bursts over several days but she did it. I trimmed and sewed on the binding and showed her how to hand stitch the binding down.  She found this very tedious and so I finished it off for her. I didn't want to put her off sewing by being pedantic about completing the project.

I have embroidered a label detailing her name, made with Granny and Summer 2017. 
This afternoon I am collecting her from school so I will hand it over to her then.  I hope she is as pleased and excited as I am about finishing her First Quilt!

Linking up with So Scrappy Saturday

Angie has announced the new colour for September - it's orange, a colour that is extremely sparse in my stash so I have very few scraps to play with.  I like the colour and love using it in my quilts but find it tends to get used up and so, no scraps.

Over the past month or so I have been cutting many of my really tiny scraps into 1.5" squares so I knew I had a few orange ones.  However many of them are repeats but I did manage to make 2 Roman Stripe blocks.

I did quite a bit of sewing with scraps yesterday and a little more today and produced a few more Roman Stripe blocks. I am making sure I make pairs of the same colour because when they fit together into a quilt you need two pairs of different colours in each block - eg 2 pinks and 2 greens.

The single turquoise block pairs with another turquoise one I made earlier in the week.

I also made 2 x 49 patch blocks, green and yellow.  These are quite fiddly to make so I will only make single ones occasionally!