Finishing Frenzy, Week 3

Another great week of finishing donation quilts for kids! It was a busy week with our family contractor Jeff having to fix some drain issues in the shower of the master bathroom. Thank goodness we caught it early and it was fixed with minimal hassle (and expense) over the course of a few days. The weather has been positively frigid here. Now if we’d only get some clouds and snow so it would warm up! 

OK, so let’s continue with the Fall Finishing Frenzy, week 3. This week I have four quilt finishes to share. The first is this red and blue checkerboard quilt that I finally got quilted. I showed the top about a month ago, but it was waiting patiently for its turn to be finished. I had/have so many projects in various stages of completion, that I decided to focus on nothing but finishing them for the rest of the year. 

The checkerboard quilt was quilted using a walking foot to quilt a grid in the light blue (denim-look chambray) squares. The finished quilt is 48x56, a good-sized quilt for an older boy. 

Next up was the delightful Rainbow Elephants quilt. Oh my, I love this little quilt!

Rainbow Elephants measures 40x47”. Thanks again for the elephant print, Nann!

Then it came time to quilt the two quilts using black scraps and bright fabrics (backing on the first and the cat fabric on the second) from my friend Wanda. 

This quilt doesn’t have an official name, but I refer to it as “the carpenter check” because of the three squares of a bright tool print interspersed . The 28 black string blocks really helped whittle down my stash of black strings! I oriented the string blocks differently in each row to give the quilt a bit more movement. 

Quilted in a basic stipple, it measures 42x48”. 

Next up: Black and Bright Cats, 40x49”.

I used blue thread to quilt the top and bottom strips, and black thread to quilt the rest. The backing photo shows the cute Tula Pink cats eyes fabric (which my friend Sally says is now commanding exorbitant prices) used to supplement the cat fabric. 

Here’s a closeup of some of the quilting. 

This week I also started dabbling in using up some of my brown scraps. First, I found a scrap print that had brown and a couple other colors (guitars and banjos), and cut 21 squares of 6.5”. Then I made 21 brown string blocks (by now you should know I loves me my string blocks!). Together these 42 blocks will form the center of a quilt I’m working on for next week. There will be an aqua stop border surrounding them, and a still-to-be-determined outer border. I figured the guitar print and masculine colors warranted a somewhat larger quilt size for an older boy. Here’s a peek:

The fabrics on the right will be the backing - either the browns together OR the blue denim-look. Fun fact: that lovely medium brown print is 36” wide. Yeah, it’s old, but it’s pristine! It was in one of the estate sale boxes that my friend Ruby found for me this summer!

Finally,  I sewed three “chocolate” crumb candy blocks which will finish at 6”.

The making of crumb candy blocks will be one of my 2023 Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects. Today I’m linking up to the RSC’s Scrappy Saturday. 

Have a great week!