Leah fleece backed

Leah was given a quilting book for Christmas that showed a few ideas of how to adapt classic quilt patterns with a fresh look. We thought this one was a good match for her skill level and a really handy size/style. The front is a pretty simple "around the world" pattern, but with a few little twists as some of the squares are broken down into four smaller squares and rotated to make a secondary pattern. Then, instead of using batting and backing, the pattern has you just use a piece of fleece - makes it cuddly, but not too heavy, and means that the quilting doesn't have to be too close together because there's only the two layers to hold. She and I had a great time picking out the fabrics, and really liked the fleece, which totally tied it all together!

The binding was a fun ah-ha as it used a rather garish, but perfectly suited to this quilt, fabric that had been Matt's grandmother's that we inherited with the house!

Leah got to take this one to the Dakota County Fair with 4H.

Evania's quilt

There's a tiny bit of the purple kitty-paw-print!

Evania's quilt was a true departure for me. I'd seen an idea in a book about little "improv" blocks, and decided to give it a try. I also wanted to experiment with letting the quilting of a quilt take a higher priority in the design of the quilt, and figured there was no better way to do it than with a solid light colored background. The color families still follow the general colors of the other kids' quilts - purple, green, yellow and pink, but with lots of lee-way within those general ranges. The pink square is made of the left over from the backing of Rinnah's quilt.

I used a variety of different patterns for the machine quilting. Some straight lines evenly spaced, some with a more rhythmic approach, and some randomly spaced. One portion has leaves and curving lines, and one (the last one, because I'm still not very good at it!) is a free-form of swirls and flowers.

The backing of Evania's quilt is a bright, cheery print to offset the mostly-yellow front (just in case she isn't as interested in my experimentation!) Instead of trying to hide the necessary seam, I highlighted it with a row of scraps from the fabrics on the front of the quilt. I was particularly pleased with how well the stitching on the narrow-wide part of the quilting ended up aligning with the stripe on the backing. I *tried* to do it, but wasn't sure how closely I could hit it since I was working from the front!

The binding on this one was a separate binding instead of bringing the backing over to the front. I had some 1" double fold bias binding left over from repairing a quilt for my mother-in-law, and from a quilt I had made for a client. The colors (dark purple and dark green) were just right for this quilt. I estimated, stitched it on, and then realized I didn't have *quite* enough, so finished it off with an on-the-grain double folded border in pink to get around the last corner. The binding was machine stitched onto the front and then hand-blind-stitched on the back side.

The quilt was machine pieced, cutting the pieces for the small improv squares as I went - none of them were pre-planned, and one of them was so lousy I didn't use it. ;) I used low-loft cotton batting and machine quilted it. It was finished *after* Gloria was born and after we'd started the adoption process for B and T! Nothing like impending future work to provide the incentive to get a project finished!