scrappy quilts

I finished my last two quilts for Project Linus this week.  I think I made five or six this year?  In keeping with my theme of "use all the scraps," I made these quilts entirely out of stuff I already had.  There are even some scraps from my old doll dresses (!) that my mom gave me.  My scrap sizes kept them small, and they were perfect for continuing to home my quilting technique.  The orange one came out great, but the blue one's quilting got a little out of hand.  They washed beautifully and I'm learning that in quilting, a run through the washing machine can hide a multitude of sins :-)

I'm not sure if you can tell from these pictures, but I tried to do a loop-de-loop quilting pattern on the blue quilt.  It was a little challenging wrestling the quilt back and forth through my sewing machine, but nothing worse than I've already had to do before.  Normally if there's any shifting or puckering that happens, it's on the front of the quilt.  This time, all the shifting happened on the back.  I'm not sure if I pinned enough while basting so ended up doing a lot of extra wrestling to shift the quilt "sandwich" to be where it was supposed to be.  To be honest, it was kind of a nightmare to work with but fortunately, running the finished quilt through the wash made the whole thing kind of crinkly which balanced out the problems. 

 

I used a scrappy binding too.  I've heard of quilters who save the unused ends of their bindings and then combine them into a mega-scrappy binding.  I should try this; I just cut strips from leftover fabric.  

 

I really fell in in with the orange quilt!  It so bright and cherry - these pictures don't do it justice. 

I went back to straight line quilting for this one but I did a chevron-ish pattern vertically and then sewed straight lines on the horizontal.  I am happy to report there was very little puckering!  I am very pleased with how the quilting came out. 

I used a black polka dot binding that came from leftover fabric from a skirt I made last year.  Still not sure if using black in a child's quilt is ok, but I really like the look.  I couldn't think of any other color binding that would have matched the cacophony of colors I used. 

I'm so happy to drop these off next weekend!