Pieced fleece blanket - snowman

 We had so much fun making the pink one that we dug through, found another good piece from Tammy to use as backing, and put together another one! Rinnah helped even more on this one, doing some cutting to bolster our supply, and also doing some of the sewing to keep it moving. We got it done over three days!

Pieced fleece blanket - pink

 Not sure if this really counts as a quilt or not, because it's missing the inner layer, but it shares enough qualities with these (Leah's, Bobbi's, Owen's) that I think it works. The front layer is pieced, and it's plenty warm because of the double layers, but it's not quilted at all. (Also see Isaiah's "quilt" - exactly the same concept.)

The kids' 4H group was making tie blankets for a women's shelter with donated fleece. We dug through my old fleece scraps (many of which were already cut and ready to go) and paired them with a piece of fleece we'd been given by Krassi and Reuben's school para when she was cleaning out her basement, and voila!

The pattern is totally random on purpose (saves time), and was unified simply by limiting the color palette to whatever reds, pinks, and purples I had ready to go. Funny - you can see where I started piecing the rows before I decided to also include the 4-square squares. The decision to include the smaller ones was largely so I would have enough material, but I think it really makes the blanket! Happy accident.

Rinnah helped me a bit with the piecing of this one, and Evania also contributed a tiny bit to the work.

Owen's memory quilt

 This was a fun surprise present for Owen for Christmas! It's all of his old soccer shirts (well, most of them), and a variety of other significant pieces of his childhood, all tied together with a cotton soccer print and backed with an amazingly soft red fabric, that was a pain to work with, but well worth it for how much he loves it!

Tsvetomira's quilt

 Finally got baby number nine's quilt finished! While I started Tsvetomira's at the same time as Bobbi's and Gloria's, there's been a lot going on since the beginning of it, and even though I've been working on it regularly, it's just taken that long to get it done. And she doesn't know (which is why the other two were higher on the completion list!) But we know!

I got the basic design (the squares "sliding" on the horizontal bars) from a book that I'll have to dig up the name for eventually! Pinks and blues have been our theme for Mira's things, so the quilt was designed to bring them together.

This vivid pink batik for the backing was something I picked out when we had first started talking about adopting Mira, before we had even seen Bobbi's photo!

A second fabric, blue and white background with pink flowers, setting the color theme for everything to follow, was the only other that I purchased specifically for the quilt; everything else is made up of memories and connections to other projects.

I continued my experimentations with free-motion machine quilting, and though it's not as uniform as I had hoped, it will be sufficient. My favorite thing was the attempt at including lettering!

It's maybe a little hard to see (maybe a different color thread would have been better?) but there it is: Made for Tsvetomira 2020. (Note: the fabric in the upper right of this square is the blue/white/pink that I chose for the theme-setter.) After that success I tried a few others:

And, like all of the others, she's got a bit of the kitty-paw-print fabric in her quilt, too. It just wouldn't be complete without it!

Daddy had a great idea to keep Mira's quilt in her hospital bag so she'll always have it with her when she's sick. It keeps it cleaner than everyday use around here can, and is something special to leave with her so everyone knows she's special to us. :) So now, once I finish Ebenezer's (I have an idea/sketch!) I'll be caught up. 

Used my favorite low-loft cotton batting. Binding was bias cut from a fabric that one of Reuben's paras from school (who also used to work with Krassi) gave us last spring. It's pink and white and has glitter on it! Certainly not an upscale quilting fabric, but totally fun and just right for this quilt.

Castellan's quilt

Happy first birthday! Since it happened during the COVID-19 quarantine, we didn't get to go to his birthday party, but a whole van full of the kids drove out with Matt to deliver the denim quilt that was a joint effort.

Made all with stuff we had already on hand (nice to have a stash in the basement!) we put this one together with a fun fleece with cars on it and the girls helped me pick the color of yarn to tie it with - actually three colors! Something we haven't done before on one of these!

Leah and Rinnah helped sew the quilt top (actually one we had done up ahead of time about a year ago, maybe?), then Rinnah, Evania and I machine stitched the binding. Gloria, who I don't yet let use the machine, was the cutter while I strung the yarn through, and Evania helped trim the yarn after I tied it. Ebenezer just tested it out. ;)

Evania's

This one maybe doesn't *quite* count as a quilt, but it is pieced, and makes a little blanket! Evania's been learning a variety of skills, including cross stitching, which is the focal point here. As she and I decided how to finish it, we went with a blanket approach for her dolls, and she chose some really soft red stuff left over from Owen's Christmas quilt, and a bit of owl fleece left over from Ruthie's quilt for the back.

Narwhal quilt

This is another one of Leah's, made after the same pattern Matt and I have done for the denim baby quilts. She made a neat pattern alternating khaki pants with denim, and used some really sweet squares from a pair of baby overalls with little pink hearts on them. The squares were all precut (as we have a box of hundreds of them that we keep stockpiled), but she did all of the work on her own.

The narwhal fabric she found is simply adorable, and we loved how it tied in the exact pink and greenish-blue that is on the special embroidered denim.

She chose to tie the quilt in the middle of the light squares instead of at the corners as Matt and I usually do - another touch that makes it more "hers."