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Monkeying Around
April 2020

Here is the fifth baby quilt to be donated to the Little Lambs Foundation as part of this year’s Hands2Help Challenge. I used the 7 Seas design from McKay Manor Musers for three of the five baby quilts, as choosing and doing a unique applique for each was fun. It also was less time spent on the piecing part, so more time could be spent on the quilting part. For the quilting, I stitched intersecting circles, using a trick I picked up from the Thimblelady website. They have a lot of free quilting templates – and ...

Peach (Dino Dragon)
April 2020

I seldom make baby quilts, however this makes the fourth I’ve done in the last several weeks, and I have one more that’s almost finished. All five will be going to the Little Lambs Foundation based in Utah as part of this year’s Hands2Help Challenge.

I really liked the simplicity of the 7 Seas design, from McKay Manor Musers, which I used for Deep Blue Sea. Here too, I chose to deviate from the original puppy or kitty design and instead used a dinosaur for the applique to match the dinosaur fabric ...

Deep Blue Sea
April 2020

The design for this baby quilt is called 7 Seas Blanket, from McKay Manor Musers. While the pattern calls for a kitty or puppy applique at the bottom of the center vertical block, I opted to use a whale to match my bottom fabric. I stuffed him with puff batting to make him more three-dimensional and backed him with flannel to add stability before attaching to the quilt. Since I am still a newbie to quilting on a domestic sewing machine, I played around with different designs, making waves, rippling water, currents, and jumbo letters ...

Grandma’s Garden
March 2020

While I typically make what I like to call quankets – fleece backed quilt tops – I’ve been experimenting over the past year with machine quilting. I had pretty much resigned myself to thinking that machine quilting would be too difficult on my 1940’s something, narrow-neck Singer 401, and while it is challenging to manipulate the quilt on certain turns, I find if I go slow, it’s not too bad.

The center is quilted to resemble a flower, and from there, I borrowed visuals from my garden for the other quilting designs – leaves, vines ...

Spot
March 2020

If I had a pet giraffe, I think I’d name it Spot. The impetus for this quilt was the giraffe-like minky fabric on the back and some cute animal fabric I had leftover from Peek-a-Boo on the Savannah. I fussy cut the animal fabric to center the giraffe in the block, which I surrounded with 2″ squares pulled from my yellow and green scraps boxes. I’m not sure if there is a pattern name for this, as I was just winging it!

This will be included in this year’s Hands2Help Challenge being hosted by ...