Earlier Finish and a Quilt Top

Remember a while back I showed a backing with gnome fabrics, but said I couldn't show the front until the quilt was gifted? Well, my BIL has his garden quilt now, so here is a photo of the front of it!

 I just loved all of those fruit and veggie prints and every time I saw them in a store or catalog I thought of my BIL who grows an amazing vegetable garden every year. I bought an assortment of fat quarters (deciding which prints to get was hard, there are so many to choose from) and tried to come up with a design that had large enough pieces to showcase the fabrics. Most of my quilts tend to have lots of smaller pieces, so this was different for me. I opted for 4.5x6.5 cut pieces for the prints, with a brown 1.5x6.5 piece sewn to two sides to make a square. The squares finish at 6" in the quilt, and you alternate horizontally and vertically oriented squares . I think I am going to cut some of the 6.5" I Spy squares I have cut and make a few I Spy quilts with this design. It goes fast and would be quite fun for Project Linus quilts. The border fabric shows seed catalog pages, and I quilted it with names of fruits and vegetables.

I had extra fabric left from this quilt, and I liked the pattern so well I cut as many more pieces as I could from the leftovers. Today I assembled the center to an identical quilt to this one, albeit a bit smaller. I don't have enough border fabric to put on the second one, so I'll be using different border fabric as well. Besides some small squares of excess fabric, this fabric is gone without ever being integrated into the stash.

Besides piecing the center to the extra Fruit and Vegetable quilt, I assembled this baby quilt today. I put some of those squares I have been working with to a purpose in this quilt! This quilt is from the Film at Five pattern, and I used a slate blue background instead of the white the pattern suggested, and only set it 3x3 instead of 5x5. I have enough 25 patches made to make a queen/king set 6x6. I think I am going to use a gray background on that one. I am going to piece the batting for this quilt, and I plan on quilting some fairly dense spirals on it, so there will be no shifting of batting once it's done. I love the super scrappy quilts like this, and the background in the sashing gives it cohesion for those who don't like scrappy as much.

Tomorrow will hopefully be a good sewing day. I am not sure what I will work on. I have four quilts needing borders, but maybe I will start assembling Easy Street and see if I can make it five quilts needing borders. I still need more 36 patches for a future project, and I could work more on the super scrappy quilts I am getting close to having all the pieces for. We'll see. We don't leave town until Thursday, and I'm hoping to sew at least Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday will likely be laundry/packing day.