Monday Making

Still working on August Stars; I started out making the Baby size but decided I needed it to be bigger, so now I'm working my way up to Youth size. You can see the size chart and everything else about it here on the Jay Birds Quilts page.

Anyway it turns out that it's a lot of work to do that, and I went from almost-done -with-the-top to feeling a-little-behind.

I just love those big colorful stars and I didn't feel like I had enough with the Baby size. I want to keep making them and making them.

Today I finished what I hope are the last of the diamond four-patches; the genius of the pattern is there are no Y seams thanks to those triangles. Even when I enlarge it, there will be no Y seams, just some weird piecing that is still all straight.

 I really can't wait to get the top finished and start thinking about how to quilt it. What would you do?

Recently-Finished Quilts

I've been busy finishing quilts this summer.

I did two quilts using the Lone Star Baby Quilt Tutorial from Diary of a Quilter and I will probably do more. It's such an easy pattern that whips up in no time flat, and it uses ten-inch squares and is therefore great for layer cakes and fat quarter collections. Which I have plenty of. I made this first quilt with a pack of five fat quarters of imported French fabric I got at the 2018 AQS Quilt Show in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the second below from an assortment of French Provencal fabrics I've had for years. They were just waiting for the right project.

Both quilts finished at about 40" square, making them a good size for baby or crib quilts. Alternatively, you could add some borders for a larger and more conventional throw size.

For this quilt, I took a bunch of ugly jelly roll strips (ugly to me) and cut them at 8.5 inches, and then cut white fabric 4.5 x 2.5 and sewed them to make a 12" finished strip. Then I just alternated them, kind of. It's a longer story than that but that was the idea. This quilt finished at 48" square and is a great throw size, at least for me.

This arrangement was based on a commercial pattern called Stick Shift. I revised the measurements for what I had on hand. This quilt will be a charity quilt or a last-minute gift. I like it more than I thought I would, but I don't want to keep it.

The other two quilts I finished recently were (1) a charity quilt for my guild I didn't take a picture of, because I just quilted and finished it only, and (2) a gift I can't post for about six months.

Log Cabin Quilt- Completed

I finished this quilt in July but gave it to family for Christmas this year.

I embroidered the label with a combination of chain stitches and back stitches.

The quilt was made with the family summer home on the island of Nantucket in mind. I used a jelly roll of pastels mixed in with some of my scraps. The binding is scrappy, made from leftover jelly roll strips and additional scraps from my stash.