Second Quilt-as-you-go finished

Here's another one of those quilt-as-you-go strip quilts that we are making at our Seniors group.  These blocks are about 15" square, so is the size for a single bed.  

The cottons are mostly pastel shades of pink, lilac, blue, lemon, aqua and white, with some darker purple within the square and used as the sashing.  My friend Suzanne and I have been doing the machine sewing and we have a very neat quilter, Anna, hand-sewing the one finishing seam that cannot be done by machine.

We had so many fabrics to choose from.

Bits & Pieces

I can hardly believe that it's been over three weeks since I've blogged!  It's not that I haven't been doing things, but mostly just finishing up "bits and pieces" and getting stuff ready for the Crazy Adventure in Connecticut coming up at the beginning of April.  

Oh, the innocence of it.  This is my first storage for "lace & trim" from 2008.  It's 10" x 4" and has long been discarded for lace and trim!



My find of the week is this little evening handbag covered with  mother of pearl beads.  There are a few missing, but I picked it up at my favourite store for $1.24, which works out at 2 beads for 1c.

I signed up for my first DYB (do your block) CQI RR.  Six 6" square blocks are sent around to the participants.  The first chooses one and finishes it.  Then they are all sent to the second person, etc. etc.  This is a "tone on tone"  I chose the rainbow:  a block in each of yellow, green, orange, red, purple and blue.

And this is one of those "quilt as you go" strip quilts.  I seem to be quite taken with this pattern since learning how they work on the Ozzie flood relief quilt blocks that I made.  For this one I used strips from men's shirts with the centre strip a piece of silk tie.  I have just begun joining the blocks up with navy blue strips.

Australia bound

By last night I had sewn together 12 blocks and pretty well used up the strips.  But this morning when I checked the pile of strips I could have sworn that they had multiplied overnight!  I began again and put together another 4 for a total of 16 blocks which I hope to mail to Australia  this afternoon.  

16 blocks laid side by side.  Check out Jan's blog to see how she puts them together

Jan, the lady who will receive them (her blog is "Sew little time - too many quilts")  is putting donated blocks together and arranging for them to be handed out to flood victims. 

My undoing.....

Oh dear, I wasn't able to keep the one New Year's Resolution that I made for 2011!   This pile of cotton strips was just too much of a temptation, together with a story on "Sew many quilts - too little time" to not begin a new project.   

These strips were part of the fabric stash of a friend who passed away in 2009, and whose fabric we have been using for the star quilt at our Seniors' Club which I posted about.  This bag of strips I knew I wouldn't use, but just couldn't dispose of.  And now after reading the heartening story of a drive for blocks to put together into quilts for folks who have lost much in the Australian floods, I just knew that this was the purpose that I had hung on to this bag of fabric. 

It's such a simple method and they call it QAYG - Quilt As You Go, and as you can see from the photo below, I began with an 11" square of backing fabric and the same size square of batting.  Across the batting lay a strip of fabric from corner to corner.  Then pin another strip right sides together, and sew 1/4" seam joining the two strips together while sewing through the batting and backing paper, thus joining it all together in one go. This step is repeated on both sides of the middle strip of fabric until the batting is covered.

This next photo is one block finished and trimmed to 10 1/2" , the size they want.  "Sew Many Quilts Too Little Time" is the blog with the information.  I've tried to make a link, but it doesn't work.  I'm going to make blocks until I finish the strips and then post them to Australia.  If any of my local friends would like to participate, I will happily mail your blocks along with mine.