Easy as 11

Here's the next in my recent roll o' fabric quilt quintet:

"Easy as 11" from Simple Quilts from Me and My Sister Designs: Easy as 1, 2, 3.

This is such a simple, but fun, design. Mine looks maybe a little odd, as it is square rather than the intended rectangle. I had to omit a couple of rows to make it work with the amount of fabric I had. This one finished at 47.5" x 47.5".

What I was most excited about in quilting this one up were the solid stripes. I knew my quilting would show up really well on those, so I wanted to try and do some fun stuff. I took inspiration from Natalia Bonner's book, Beginner's Guide to Free-Motion Quilting, as well as Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. I ended up using 4 different designs, including a viney thing in the green stripes, swirls in the blue stripes, flowers in the pink stripes, figure 8s in the orange stripes, and then wide drops in the one coral stripe.

Then I stippled over the background areas. I used Aurifil Mako 50/2 in Dove (#2600) over the stripes and Superior Threads King Tut 40/3 in Parchment (#971) over the background areas.

There's that repro pink backing again. And you can see the Project Linus label down in the lower left corner. I managed to sneak in one of my last remaining bits of background fabric into the binding along with the bright and happy Kona Lagoon.

I have had so much fun working with all of these bright happy fabrics!

Shoo Fly!

I've been finishing up a storm in the last few days. My quilts for Project Linus (all of which feature fabric from the now-depleted dreaded roll) have been quilted and all but one have been bound and labeled. Woo! Let the show and tell begin!

This quilt is made from the trimmed leftovers of another Project Linus quilt. I couldn't bear the thought of just throwing out all of the half-square triangle trimmings, so I designed a project to utilize them.

It is a small quilt, only 36" x 42"-- but there was a lot of stitching involved in all those blocks!

Because the background fabric is so busy, I knew that any quilting I did would kind of get lost in all the pattern going on. So I went ahead and just did an all-over swirly design through the center and in the outermost border. In the colored border, I did some straight lines.

For all of the quilting, I used Aurifil Mako 50/2 in White (#2024).

The back is not the most awesome coordinate, but I really wanted to use my stash, and I had a lot of this fabric. At least it is a happy color!

And here is the special Project Linus label stitched onto the back. You can also see my machine-finished binding (I follow the Red Pepper Quilts binding tutorial).

I'd been calling this quilt "Churn Dash" until I realized it wasn't actually a churn dash block. Ha! After a bit of research, I learned that these are actually shoo fly blocks. Either way, it is a happy little quilt!