First Two Finishes of 2021

 I actually finished two quilts last week, but I couldn't say anything about them, because I needed to mail them to my parents and my mom reads my blog. Hi, Mom! 

They got their quilts on Monday, so now I can show them! 

I had enough of my late sister's sweaters to not only make my remaining sister a throw quilt, but I had enough to make quilts for my parents too. I figured something just big enough for them to use in their chairs while watching TV would work just fine.

This is my dad's, made with the same size squares as my sister's quilt. I wanted to make my dad's one row longer, but I was two squares short. I opted to cut two squares from a pair of my sister's jeans to make up the difference. 

You can only cut so many large squares from clothing, so my mom's is made from smaller squares. 

If you ever want to make a quilt from sweaters, let me give you one piece of advice. Use a walking foot! From piecing to quilting, a walking foot is your friend when working with stuff this stretchy. I also used 1/2" seams, which I think was a good plan. 

After making six quilts and two pillow shams from my sister's clothes, I'm pretty much over that project. I'm thankful I was able to make them, but I'm glad to have them finished. 

So now what have a been working on? A few different things actually. I've been FMQ an hour a day on a UFO. I've missed a couple days this week, but I'm making good progress, about 2/3 done and it's a queen sized quilt. I have some ripping to do tonight on that. My bobbin thread got caught on something, so the stitches on the back got all jacked. 15 minutes of quilting turned into an evening of ripping. The stitches were bad enough they'll be pretty easy to rip out. After some toubleshooting, I figured out the problem, so I should be OK for tomorrow's quilting. The sample I stitched out looked great after I fixed the problem. 

I've been assembling a couple UFO's and I finally got in the mood to do some cutting!

The big triangles are for hourglass blocks to be the alternating blocks in two I Spy quilts. The three bins are for my sunflower quilt. While I was cutting out the hourglass blocks, I got an idea for another quilt, then today I had someone ask for a quilt just like that! I love it when God gives me the idea ahead of time! 

I really need to spend a day or two cutting sashing for several quilts. I have way too many bins of finished quilt blocks, and I need to get them to quilt top stage. I'm starting with the quilts that don't need sashing just to reduce my inventory of quilts blocks quickly. 

I can assemble two tops at once (leader/ender style) without any issues IF either or both of these are true. If the blocks in each quilt are different sizes, and/or the colors of the two quilts are drastically different. In this case, both are true. I'm assembling a purple quillow top with 6" blocks, and a black/white log cabin with 7.5" blocks. I always assemble quilts in rows, then sew the rows together, and if I have two quilts ready that follow the rules above, I assemble two at once. It's a great way for me to progress a UFO to quilt top or at least quilt center if I'm adding borders. I'm adding borders less and less these days, so often at least one of them will be a completed top when I finish sewing the rows together. 

The black and white log cabin blocks are super scrappy. I made them for my scrap busting goals, and I ended up with enough blocks for more than one quilt. The first quilt I laid out in an off center barn raising pattern, but I forgot to take a photo. I started laying out the second quilt, and here's the photo of it on my design wall.

I love log cabin blocks, because there are so many cool layout possibilities. Since I have so many blocks, I didn't want to make matching quilts, so I played around and found something I liked, I'm going to add more to this quilt, and it will end up 75x90, same as the off center barn raising quilt I'm assembling now. I'll still have blocks left after two quilts, so when I get those two finished, I'll see how many blocks I still have and decide from there. There's no way I could assemble two different quilts using the same blocks at the same time and not screw something up so I'll keep adding in other quilts as I'm assembling, or I can always use some of the pieces I just cut as leaders/enders if I get tired of assembling quilts. Any way you look at it, progress is progress!