Some Finishes

Nearly everything came to a halt at the beginning of May as my work for quilt show ramped up. At the end of the month, it became important to my mental health to get into the sewing room; so I took a couple of days to quilt and bind my little Christmas Cards mini, which finished to about 16" x 18". I do like this little quilt a lot. 

After finishing up most of my work for the month of June, I dedicated myself to finishing Granddaughter's birthday quilt. Unicorn Abstraction was a kit from VioletCraft, and it has all the elements my DGD loves--a unicorn, rainbow colors, stars, and metallic fabrics. And she loved it when she got it for her birthday. 

The quilt finishes at 60" x 60", and the entire quilt is paper pieced. The pattern was well done, and I had no trouble assembling the pattern. 

One really good tip the designer had was to use those little plastic binding clips to align the pieces when sewing the large sections together. I was surprised how well they worked. 

Another really good tip was to use glue to hold the fabric pieces down at the edges of the sections. Except for the head and tail, most of the pattern pieces were really big, and they flopped around at the edges. I have never been a big fan of using glue in any of my sewing; but in this case it was nearly a necessity to keep everything flat and aligned. 

I used the Sewline glue pen on the regular fabrics, but that didn't hold the metallics down well at all. So I resorted to Roxanne's Glue Baste It, which worked a little too well. I found it a bit difficult to remove the paper in those spots, but I'm sure it all washed out in the end. 

Loved the detail in the head and the tail.

I quilted it with a stars and loops design from Sue Schmeiden. Before I washed it, it looked like the horse had curly hair, lol; but after laundering it became soft and crinkly, and the quilting was less clear. 

This afternoon I finished binding the Bon Bon quilt, which was the first quilt made from Barbara's Scrap Bag. See the post here describing my Scrap Bag Challenge.

My quilt chapter found a new organization to donate to this year, called C.R.O.W.N.S. They are an organization local to Maine that provides assistance for women and girls who are being trafficked in the state. I found it shocking to discover that this goes on in Maine. C.R.O.W.N.S. was asking for quilts about 50" x 60", and that is just about the size of this one, so it will go to them. 

The original quilt pattern called for more blocks to make a square quilt, and the blocks were to be set in a Trip Around the World pattern. I wanted a smaller rectangular quilt, so I settled on this zig zag sort of design. I like it just fine. 

I quilted it with the Popcorn pantograph by Jodi Beamish. 

With the exception of the solid whites that went into the Bon Bon quilt, this is the entire stack of fabric from Barbara's Scrap Bag, which is taller than my big embroidery machine. I started cutting up some of the low volume neutrals for Bonnie Hunter's Cherry Crunch quilt, and didn't even put a dent in them. There's a LOT of fabric in this stack. 

I have a couple different quilts I'm going to cut for as I go along, but the next one I intend to work on in earnest is Carolina Chain, from Bonnie's book 'Addicted to Scraps'. That should use a bunch.