Charity quilts

At the moment I'm working on 40 lap quilts for an old folks care home. I have had a lot of stuff hoarded for charity quilts but lacked the enthusiasm to do more than one every six weeks or so. Now I have a definite goal as there are 40 residents.  

Most of the flimsies are done, I finished webbing these tops and putting on scrappy  borders today. I cut the borders at 2 1/4", same as the binding. I love a scrappy binding! 

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A sample batch of 6 have been delivered, including these .

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I bound these two this week

There was a hiccup with this one, I cut the backing tooo small, so some orphan blocks came in handy! 

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These broken dishes blocks are my leader enders, cut from 2" strips 

I have been doing these for months now and have quite a stack, the aim is a queen size! 

Stripper

I raided the string bin for neutral strings, then chopped into rough 5" strips. I also cut off some selvages as the cream stash was handy and used some uglies up. 

 

 

 

 

Pieced onto 4 1/4" strips of paper: not ideal as it was quite heavy paper, but it did the job.  I used strips from 2 1/2 to 3/4".

My Daughter in law happened to come over and got rather excited about the peeling process! She had not seen this before, so we both worked on the papers for an hour, then I finished them the next day. Help was gratefully received!  I recon I have enough for three borders for king size quilts! Each strip is about 11"; pressing and trimming at a later date, as I could cut them in half for 2" sashing too.

I also made some pieced squares with the larger crumbs as I was going. I can use these as centres in a charity quilt. 

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 Still plugging away with the 3" finished broken dishes blocks as leaders and enders. I have sewn a lot into sets of four as I keep loosing the bits if they hang around on the sewing table too long between being needed. Much more user friendly. I have quite a pile now. I spin the seams as they come off the machine, but don't iron.  These need a lot of accuracy: as they are so small there is no wriggle room.

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This weekend I am working on the Allietare blocks, tricky little things to get the points to meet! Taking it slowly. The blue is my 'red' from Bonnie's design.

 A few more geese were needed for accuracy practice.

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I was all sewed out in the middle of the week: I found some short lengths of yarn, a couple of metres each (I am not a hoarder!) and made a scrumble, very therapeutic.

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Other evenings have been spent ironing blocks and ironing blocks and ironing blocks......

....these are done

 and these are done.

 About the same to go!

I put the mini ironing board  and iron on my lap on top of a cushion in front of the TV, I don't feel its such a terrible chore then.

Cutting corners

Literally.

And thousands more to go!  

Triangles. I see them in my sleep. 

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As an antidote, I have finished this ten stitch blanket from scraps.

 

It is a double, that will be a car/picnic blanket. 

It took 2 years on and off, 1/3 million stitches! 

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The next on-off scrap blanket is this one....

It is really interesting to knit, no seams as it's knit as you go and grows quickly. 

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The clipped triangles are still being made into broken dishes blocks for a friends housewarming quilt. I am making the more random sets into pinwheels for charity quilts

A couple of hundred to have the seams spun, then be pressed, about the same still to piece. 

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I sewed the crumbs up that I had made from cutting mini broken dishes blocks, as they were all from 2" strips and easy to sort.

The crumb strips join the three sacks of  string and crumb strips waiting to be trimmed down for a crumb quilt and piano key borders!

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I won!

I have had a sumo contest with this beast and my 440, quilting in the ditch, 100  x 100".  Too big to do any free motion, so I had to go for stitching round the dark star borders in the ditch. Still hard work turning the quilt round!

 

Sisters Square Dance

Checking the back to see if I missed any ......all OK. 

I used this thread, it was very good, no breakages. 

One final round of ditch stitch on the border.......

Binding on. I feel a film coming on this afternoon.....

This is some of the work I have been doing in the last three months, in an effort to tidy and consolidate:

Enough of these for two king size projects, one of which will be combined with geese, all prepped and ready to go after Xmas.

170 scrappy Box Kite blocks, enough for two quilts. 

A few more of these to add to the stock

And a couple of hundred four patches  from a box of 2" random squares I found.

All the crumbs string pieced to make hexies, I have about two hundred to trim down.

Some random hexie and teeny diamond paper piecing whilst out and about 

Clue one of Bonnie Hunters mystery done,  'Allietare'. Cutting for clue two tomorrow. 

And I pieced the backing for nine quilt tops that are ready to go!

Purging the greens and planning a new learning curve

 I have made 395 green/brown pinwheels for two projects from the pre-cuts.

 There were a lot of two patches and four patches over from The Big Green One. 

 The four patches were dubious, so I made them into 240 six patches, I have a plan for these. 

 I made 347 4 patches from the remaining two patches, with greens that are better matched in each block, to be put by for a future project TBC.

A lot of the two patches have been hand sewn,  I took them on holiday about 5 years ago!  It made for very easy seam spinning of 395 sets.

I used some of the very odd four patches, (here the centre blocks are really brown and yellow!) to make scrappy nine patches to join the pile of over 100 I have already.

Thirty seven of these made, you can't really tell they contain a green/neutral four patch.







I have  chain sewn sets of triangles  for Box Kite, to be pressed:  I  made 14  blocks so far.  I really like this block. The top centre one doesn't fit with the others as the blue is too pale. There will be enough for at least two quilts, so I can sort them into tone block types when they are all done.

I also did a few Perkiomen Daydreams blocks.  I will be pressing the ones I have to check the accuracy (it's difficult to determine without a press as they finish at 1"). If I am not happy  I will abandon this project. I can't work out why my pinwheel accuracy is almost always spot on, but simple squares seem wonky.  This is Bonnie's  block and its perfect! 





I have been investigating one block wonder quilts. They are not a difficult to construct as I thought, helpful videos found on Youtube.    Bruce Seeds's Flickr page shows some informative pictures about fabric choices.



I found these in my stash, good quality fabrics bought at silly sale prices as backing.










I also bought  several metres in the sale from Lady Sew and Sew ( UK), one of my favorite online shops, of this Makower fabric that I think will do well, lots of colour and shape variation. Don't know about the size of the print yet, as it hasn't arrived!

I stashed some ideas on my Pinterest page too.