Christmas Garden

This is my most recent finished project.  I finished the binding on my way home from our trip to New Jersey to visit family.  This is the first quilt that I have made that is for my own bed.  It is for the Christmas season, so I won't actually be using it anytime real soon, but at least it is finished.  Also, it completes one of the things on my quilting "to-do" list from last year.

I decided to call it Christmas Garden, because it was made from a block called Nordic Garden and the focus fabric was poinsettias.  Seemed appropriate for a Christmas garden to me.

Patriotic Bento Box Baby Quilt

Last year I made a patriotic quilt out of Star Spangled Bandana fabric using a Bento Box pattern that I found online.  (I called the quilt Fireworks!)  When I started making the quilt, I thought that I would make it a little larger than the size that I finally went with, so I had three blocks left over.  I wanted to do something with the leftover blocks, so I bought some more fabric in the same line, cut three more 2-1/2 inch strips (the original was made with a jelly roll), and voila, a patriotic baby quilt.

It measures 36 x 48 inches, which seems like a good baby quilt size, or I suppose that it could be used as a lap quilt by someone in a wheelchair.  It might be a good size for that, I'm not really sure.  I also still need to decide what I'm going to do about the quilting.  I'm not sure if I want to quilt it myself, or have it quilted.  Ah, decisions, decisions. . .

Andouille Quilt in Cool Blues

This quilt top gets me yet another step closer to meeting my quilting goals for the year.  One of the goals was to  make a quilt from one of the quilting books that I got for Christmas in 2014.  This pattern comes from one of those books, Jelly Roll Jambalaya Quilts by Jean Ann Wright.  The pattern is called Andouille Quilt and the original is made in warm shades of red, orange and yellow.  I wanted something cooler, so I went with cool blues.  The pack of "2-1/2 inch strips" that I used was called "Artisan Spirit - Shimmer Blue Lagoon" from Northcott Fabrics. 

The reason I put 2-1/2 inch strips in quotes above is because they weren't really 2-1/2 inches wide.  They weren't even consistently the same width within each strip.  Maybe a couple of strips were 2-1/2 inches wide.  Several, if not most, were only 2-3/8 inches wide.  That's not a lot of difference, but in a pattern like this it can really add up.  It was frustrating to work with.  I used a narrower seam allowance, and still had to trim the "blocks" to a shorter length than what was given in the directions.  It worked out in the end.  I just wish that pre-cuts were more reliably the size they are supposed to be.