Rainbow Pinwheel Garden for Cindy

This quilt was inspired by a special lady named Cindy. She has always been very kind to me, and tried to insist last Christmas that I not give her anything. I wanted her to know how much I appreciate her. Cindy loves to garden, and had recently gotten some bad news health wise, so I decided to put my stash to use in a cheerful garden that will be in bloom all year.

This is where the magic happens.

I went at this with no pattern. No specific plan. I've always had a real fondness for the Pinwheel block. This quilt was largely stash, believe it or not. I've been collecting fabric for over 15 years now, and almost all of my fabrics from the beginning are floral in nature. (Sometime I'll show you my sunflower fabric collection!)

On the left is my fly by the seat of my pants attempt at a Double Pinwheel. You can see that even though my center points match up well, the outer edges, where the solids meet their patterned counterparts are out of alignment. 

On the right, my solution: a black border fashioned from a strip of 1/4" bias tape.

My freestanding quilting hoop. All kinds of great.

Before quilting. You can see the grey/black batting.

All told, this was about 3 feet square. I mostly machine quilted it, with the exception of some vine looking handwork around the middle square. The batting was a grey/black low loft polyester. For the back I just added strips of each fabric to add a little pop with the black. She loves it and it's hanging at the top of the stairs in the family home.

Quilts for Little Boys

These were Christmas presents for two little boys. The 2 year old likes cars, trucks- really anything with wheels. The 1 year old, well he doesn't have a lot of preferences yet, but he sure does love the family's assorted dogs. These were the first quilts I'd finished in years, and even at just 36x46" the largest. I took my cues from Elizabeth Bett's Car Quilt from Beginner's Guide to Quilting.

The tops are pieced in cotton. I did go out and buy fabric special for these as I don't keep a lot of kid oriented fabric on hand. They were both supposed to be all 5 inch squares, but the construction equipment print ended up being too big for that. A very nice lady at my Local Quilt Shop suggested making large squares of it instead. Brilliant! The backs on both are flannel. Rather than the usual binding, I just brought the back around. I used a low loft all cotton batting. For the quilting, I did it by hand with with a perl thread. Thank goodness I have a standing quilting hoop because it saved me a lot of backache.

Overall, I'm very pleased. The dog one especially came out exactly like I pictured. I washed them with color catchers before wrapping them up and got a tiny bit of bleeding even still on the cars one. I hear from their mom that they're getting a lot of use out of them!