Category Archives: Quilts

Quilt for a Summer Baby

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Around here, we’re pretty excited because we have another grandchild on the way. The little one is due this summer. I stumbled onto this tutorial for a lightweight rag quilt without batting, and it seemed like the perfect choice for me to make for our new little grandson or granddaughter.

The back of the quilt doesn’t have the fringe; it’s just nice, soft and smooth:

I found the two flannel prints at Hobby Lobby. The quilt requires two yards of each print, so the gorgeous flannels I saw online for $10 a yard were going to be too expensive for me. Hobby Lobby’s lower prices and 40% off coupon on one print were just the ticket.

I highly recommend the tutorial at the website linked above. I appreciate Angie sharing her knowledge.

T-Shirt Quilts

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A year after my daughter had her first baby, she decided that many of the craft projects she’d been working on pre-baby were never going to get finished, so she cleared them out, but not before offering them to me. I felt bad letting the many t-shirt squares she had cut up so carefully go to waste, so I offered to finish the quilt she had intended to make.

T-shirt quilts are easy but time-consuming. In this case, I was working with 6” squares and one big rectangle. I paired up the squares with a 5” scrap of batting in the middle (I had tons of batting scraps from previous quilts I’d made) and sewed an X across each pair.

Once all 250+ squares were stitched, I sewed them together in rows using a ½” seam allowance, making sure to keep all seam allowances to the front. I cut the rectangle to fit, paired it with batting and backing of the same size, and arranged the squares around it.

I also cut the edges so that they will ruffle nicely once the quilt is washed. This is very time-consuming and, if you don’t want your hand to get very sore, requires the use of a certain kind of scissors.

Here’s what the quilt looks like on the back: 

I had enough squares for an ample-sized quilt for my daughter and son-in-law, and a little one so Baby can have her own:

I hate waste, so it felt good to make something warm and useful out of those squares. And now I have more room for fabric in my sewing area since I used up all my excess batting scraps on these quilts. 🙂

Fall Table Topper

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Years ago, I bought a fall table runner kit that consisted of precut squares to be sewn together randomly, then surrounded by prairie points. I think prairie points are an awful waste of fabric, so I decided to use all the squares for a table topper instead.

The leaf quilting motif is one I tore out of a quilting magazine. The stars are something I came up with as I went along:

This is the first time I’ve ever done machine binding. I usually hand-stitch binding, but machine binding sure goes fast! I learned how to do machine binding from Katy Quilts.

Our Endless Summer Quilt

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It all started when Hancock’s of Paducah put some charm packs on sale for $5 each. How could I pass that up when the fabric line, Saturday Morning by Basic Grey for Moda, was so cute? They weren’t the type of fabrics I would usually buy, but one design in particular, the lines of people, caught my eye. So I bought five charm packs.

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I started designing a quilt requiring over 200 5″ squares, and soon realized I was going to need a solid fabric to balance the wide variety of prints. Luckily H of P had an off-white grunge print from the line on sale, so I bought a few yards. Then I saw the Moda Love pattern on Pinterest and decided it would be perfect for the center of my quilt.

The quilt would be quite large, maybe bigger than any quilt I’d ever made. I decided it would be perfect for our bed. Wouldn’t you know, H of P put batting on sale, including an extra-light batting that I had never tried before. I bought one, figuring I could make a summer quilt. I also bought a very busy triangle print from the Saturday Morning line for the binding, and a wild streaky blue print for the borders.

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It took me a while to decide how to quilt this quilt. I decided on one design for the center, modified a flower design from Lori Kennedy’s blog for the squares, and modified another flower for the border from the same blog (she’s so talented, and has some awesome tutorials on her blog). Here’s the back of the quilt where the squares are:

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I named this the “Endless Summer Quilt” because my husband and I fell in love one summer over 40 years ago and married three years later; in the summer, of course. I hope we use this summer quilt for many, many years to come.

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My Simply Eclectic Quilt

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I’ve never made a quilt exactly like the pattern before. I might use a pattern with scraps, or with precuts, or with yardage I bought specifically for that pattern. But when I discovered the pattern for Simply Eclectic, I had to have that quilt just as the designer intended it to look, which meant buying the exact fabrics she used (which she also designed).

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Fortunately, the lovely indigo prints were available at Hancock’s of Paducah; I found the solids at Missouri Quilt Co. I also found a gray print from the designer’s line at H of P that I used for backing.

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The only thing I did differently than the designer did was to quilt inside the solid-colored blocks, because after I finished quilting the top in straight lines, those beautiful solid squares looked like they needed something. So I echoed a few motifs from the indigo prints.

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Photos don’t do the indigo fabrics justice; they’re so lovely. This quilt now lives on the back of my recliner, where I can see and touch it every day.

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