More Fan Blocks

Now that my design wall is empty AGAIN, I made a few fan blocks for the quilt Dianne and I are working on together.  Here they are:

I'm supposed to make 22 more, and here are 8, so 14 left to go.  They don't take long, maybe around 15  or 20 minutes each.  The hard part is deciding what fabrics to use.  We are trying not to repeat any fabrics.  There are a FEW repeats though, because Dianne and I have some of the same fabrics, and we each used them.  No one will notice!  OR it could be a game.... "can you find 2 fabrics that are alike??"  I think I have run out of large enough scraps, and have graduated to Fat Quarters.  I like making these blocks, and all of them together are so colorful!  Who will get this quilt?????

Charity Quilt

While I'm waiting for my extra Something Blue fabric, I decided to work on a charity quilt that my quilt guild was talking about.  It's called "Hats of Hope," an organization that gives hats and quilts to babies in the mountains of the tropics to keep them warm.  Whoever thinks babies get cold in the TROPICS???  But they do, in the higher elevations.  It's COLD in the mountains!

 

The quilts have to be small, around 36-40 inches.  I whipped his baby quilt up in a couple days.  It was small enough to pin on my dining room table.  It's made up of a one-yard cut of "outer space and aliens" fabric, and the back is pieced from flannel scraps I had left over from another quilt.  The binding is also made from leftover scraps.

Detail of the Quilting.

The Finished quilt!

The Backing and Binding.

Back to the Blue!

I have enjoyed working on my Something Blue quilt, and had finished the quilt as it is shown in the kit.  It's beautiful!

It measures only 71" x 71", which I think is on the "smallish" size.  I like bigger quilts!  So I have devised a plan to add a border around the quilt, maybe like a 1" inner border and a 5" outer border, adding 12" to the quilt, so it would finish off at around 83" square.  Much better.  

Alas, I do not have enough fabric left over in the scraps to accomplish this.  The kit was very generous with it's fabric, you could easily recover from an error if you cut a strip too large (or 7 strips, which is what I did!  Oops!)  So I emailed the designer and asked her if I could buy extra fabric.  She answered immediately and sent me a link to a quilt shop in New Hampshire that sells her fabrics.  I went to the website and found the fabric I needed and ordered it!  Hooray!  Now I just have to wait for it to arrive!

Quarter Quilt

Our Quilt Committee has been working, and we have 1/4 of the raffle quilt put together.  Here it is.

I copied this photo into Paint, rotated it and pasted it 3 times to show what a finished quilt would look like.  Up to now, we really didn't have a good idea of what it was going to look like!  Here it is!

I'm not overly thrilled with it.  I think it has too much white in it.  But everyone else loves it, so that's good.  It's too late to change it now anyway. I'll be glad when this project is over.  I really don't like working on committees.  We had to redo several blocks that the girls from the quilt guild sewed, and there were three that we couldn't use.  Our "fudge factor" proved extremely valuable, because not only did we have that extra half inch all around to help square up the blocks, but we had made 3 extra kits for each block, "just in case."  Guess what!  Just in case happened.  The directions on the blocks said "DO NOT TRIM THE BLOCK."   Yep,  someone trimmed the blocks, and badly.  We did not have to remake those blocks because we had 3 extra, so we had enough.  Why can't people just READ and FOLLOW DIRECTIONS??  Committees frustrate me.  I thought it was a bad idea to have everyone in the guild make these blocks.  Maybe I am just too much of a perfectionist when it comes to making quilts. 

OK, enough of this rant.  It's not good for the spirit!