11 Little Preemie Quilts All In A Row

I finished another 11 little preemie quilts for our local NICU today!

 

I have to say I am so happy that these are finished as well!  This makes 15 preemie quilts for me so far this year.  My other 4 preemie quilts can be found here.  I usually do between 5 - 20 of these a year.  My youngest was in a NICU for just 5 days but it really impacted our family - so I try to give a little back for the excellent care we had while my son was there.  The nurses and doctors really, really cared about the babies and did their absolute best for us.  That's why I brought the preemie quilt charity program to our guild years ago.  Since then, it has taken on a life of it's own and grown and stabilized.  It is wonderful to see.

I usually make my preemie quilts out of my left-overs from all of the baby quilts I make; but, sometimes I find a great deal on some kid fabrics and I buy it up!  It feels so good to give to others in this way.  This might be the only baby quilt for a lot of these babies.

If you would like to see how I make my preemie quilts you can find my preemie quilt tutorial here.

I encourage you all to make a few little preemie quilts!  They are an excellent way to use up some scraps of left-over blocks and they go to a great cause.  Just check with your local NICU to see what size etc they would like first.

Happy Quilting All!

Where Have I Been??

Where have I been?  Why haven't I been blogging for a bit?  Well, I will tell you - unless you are a member of my Facebook Page - then you already know.

I have been marking this quilt to get it ready for hand-quilting.

 

Remember this quilt?  I finished the top in March of 2011 and put it into my quilting closet until now!

 

Take a look at all that marking!  I marked this with the Clover wash-away blue pen at 7/8" cross-hatch.  Wowzers!  This quilt is about 98" x 120" and this marking took me FOREVER!  I think it took around 40-50 hours - or season one of Game of Thrones and seasons one and two of Ghost Whisperer.  Crazy huh?  All the blue lines I had to mark and we will hand quilt along those lines and in the ditch around each of the red units.  The quilting will take a while but it will be worth it I think!

 

Here it is loaded onto the hand quilting frame with a few stitches in.  Looks great doesn't it?

I am so happy to have this on the frame!  Now I can move onto other things - yey!!

It's Finished and Ready to be Given Away!!

Yey - Yey - Yey!!  It is finished finally the maple leaf is quilt is DONE!

 

Didn't it turn out well?  I love it.  This quilt will be donated to the town of Arnprior to celebrate our 150th Anniversary.  The maple leaves symbolize our logging industry.   Our local guild members made the blocks and I put them into a quilt top.  A guild member long-armer machine quilted it for us and she did an amazing job.

 

Didn't she do a nice job??

 

The quilting is lovely Thank you Shirley Cavanaugh fo a wonderful job.

 

Next I pressed myself to get the binding, label and sleeve all finished so that I could hand it off in two days.  Wowzers what a lot of work!  I always forget how many hours go into the finishing touches!  I got pretty nervous though because the thread that I had, that worked with the binding, was right down to the little bits to finish!  I kept thinking - oh no - what if I don't have enough??  Everything is closed for the long weekend - I was fine!  Yey!

 

The label was another thing to do - we had two extra blocks come in.  You know when you organize these type of things you don't expect to get all the blocks back?  Well, we did!  So we had out two extra that went onto the back with the label.  Nice effect huh?  I like it!

Anyways, this is done and ready to be handed off on Wednesday!!

Finally!!

I finally finished the top!!  My latest leaders and enders quilt top is finished and ready to be loaded onto my quilting frame!!  Well, ok, I have to find/make a backing for it first but you get the idea ;-)

 

Is it weird that I am THIS excited about finishing this top??  I have been working on this top for soooo long now so it just feels really good to have completed it!! 

 

Here's a close-up of the quilt top.  It is completely pieced!  that was the challenge that I set for myself with this quilt.  There are no long straight strips to this quilt it is completely pieced.  Whew!!

If you are not familiar with the leaders and enders technique you can check out my video here:

Leaders and Enders Video

And if you would like to see how I pieced this quilt using my 2" squares you can see it here:

Crossroads Quilt Video (aka this quilt)

This quilt is completely Accuquilt Go! friendly!  It requires only 2 dies - the 2" square die and the 3.5" square die - or of course you can rotary cut this as well.  I love the simplicity of using only 2 different sizes of squares to make this quilt!  However, if you have the 1.5" finished half square triangle (HST) die you could use that instead for your X-Blocks and you would have a bit less waste.  If I was to make this quilt again I think I would construct it this way since I now have that 1.5" finished HST die ;-)  When I made this quilt I didn't.

Ok now to find something for the backing and to decide how to quilt this!  I am thinking a loose all-over pattern in the center - this will be used on a bed so I don't want the quilting too dense.  Any thoughts??

 

 

 

Asian Steps

Happy Mother's Day!  I hope that all of the Moms, soon-to-be-Moms and the want-to-be-Moms out there have an amazing day filled with love and laughter!!!  We are having an absolutely beautiful day here - lots of sun shine and warm weather.

I thought that I would share a picture of the finished Asian Steps quilt that I had so much trouble deciding how to quilt!

 

It is completely finished, bound and labelled - yey!  I really like this quilt now - probably because it is finished ;-)  But hey, I am not going to complain about that at all!  

This quilt was, almost, completely cut on my Accuquilt Go! cutter using the 2 1/2" strip die; so, it made this quilt so quick and easy to put together from my Oriental fabric stash.  Pulling the fabrics for this quilt didn't seem to make a difference to the amount of fabric in there but hey!

This pattern as the Planet Patchwork New Year's Day Mystery Quilt that I took part in.  The top was finished on New Years day but the quilting was finished in May.

Now what to do with this quilt?!!

Quilting Update

Sometimes the best thing to do when you're having trouble doing something is to just admit that you're having trouble with it!

I had so much trouble deciding how to quilt that quilt top and I let it sit there since January.  Too sad.  I just didn't know what to do so I let it sit.  I think that my problem was that everything that I thought to do would suit a different fabrics - they would not suit these orientals in this pattern.

This was a mystery quilt so I had no idea what pattern we were doing, and, if I could do this quilt over I would choose different fabrics.  Although I like the quilt, I would do it differently next time.  I really like the pattern but I think that I would go with some bold colours next time.

 

I finally decided that I was going to decide and so I did!  I decided to do a sort of oriental wave and cloud all-over design.   Done!

I used two different threads on this one.  I used a YLI 40 weight variegated thread top and bobbin in the body and borders and a 40 weight rayon thread in the first border and corners. 

All's well that end well - it's quilted!!!  Thanks for all the suggestions!

I'm Stumped!

So, I am stumped!

 

 

How should I quilt this?  I've been waiting since January 1st for inspiration to strike and it just hasn't happened yet; so, I thought that I would ask all of you for ideas?  This doesn't usually happen to me so I'm very puzzled.  I like this quilt and would like to load it onto my frame and work on it.   It is the New Years Day Mystery Quilt from Planet Patchwork and I would like to git er done!

So what do you think?  Can you help a girl out??!!

Scrap Quilting!

So sorry I have been MIA!!!

My MAC had to go in for repairs and them I had the great pleasure of re-installing and configuring everything - joy!  I thought that computers were going to save us all time LOL!!

So, I had some time to do a little scrap quilting.  You know when you feel like doing some piecing but you don't want to work on anything too specific necessarily?  Well, I find that doing some scrap quilting is a great thing to do.  So, I pulled out my bin of 1.5" strips and made some more log cabins.

 

 

 I am in love with these!  I have lots of fun laying them out and seeing the possibilities with them.  Such a traditional block; but, what a GREAT scrap buster!!  My bin is down quite a bit now - But, not that much.

Does anyone else love log cabins as much as I do??

 

While I was working on these I pulled out my Cheddar Bow-Ties a la Bonnie Hunter!  I decided to do mine with scrappy oranges and so far I am loving it!  I really like how this leaders and enders project is coming along.  I should really finish my current one but I really felt like working on this one - so I did!

So, that's it for now!  What have you all been working on?  Something new?  Something old?  Something scrappy?