Quilts

I got none of my own sewing done this weekend but I did help Mom work on some of her things.  She has some quilt tops that were made by the mother of a friend of hers, that she agreed to finish.  She's had them for far too long now and got in the mood to clear the backlog this weekend, so Sherry and I pitched in.

This one is small; Sherry finished it for us a little while back but it needed the edges trimmed:

Yes, that's polyester double knit.  The picture doesn't even begin to convey the intensity or psychedelic craziness of the prints.  I don't believe I've ever seen color this saturated anywhere else.

Actually, all four quilts are double knit.  Mom finished one already--a Double Wedding Ring with psychedelic rings and dark blue center blocks on white.  The other three are Star of Bethlehem.  The acid yellow quilt above is a Star of Bethlehem variant.

The third and fourth quilts were just stars but didn't have corner blocks (the "negative space" around the stars), so we got fabric to fill them in and make complete tops.  We used blue chambray for one (it will have a dark blue back):

And dark blue pinwale corduroy for the other.  This one came with polyester corner blocks but the fabric was lighter and more stretchy than the double-knit used in the star; it was almost like swimming suit material.  Anyway, it would never work in a quilt top so Mom ripped it out:

(the blocks aren't sewn in yet here, but you get the idea).  This one will have a red back.  Both of them will probably have red edge binding.

This inspired me to get out my own misguided quilting projects.  I made this lap quilt several years ago out of some cotton bandannas from Wal-Mart.  At the time, I thought it was a great idea but now I wonder what the heck I was thinking.  Oh, well.  I got purple speckled fabric this weekend to bind it but I have no idea what I'll do with it once it's done.  Donate it somewhere, I guess.  

I was helping Mom finish an I Spy quilt for a friend of ours who recently adopted a baby, and got out my tumblers so I could cut a few more while I had scraps.  (I'll post more on the I Spy later.)  The tumbler charm quilt is going to get out of hand.  This is the top a few years ago (before I painted my room)--it's long enough but it's too narrow (it's not as wide as it looks; there is no overhang on the far side of the bed.  That's just a twin bed, too).  I have a zillion more tumblers cut but haven't sewn them together into a new section yet, which is silly because it's not as though it's difficult.

This one is a charm quilt--I'm not going to follow the zillion different rules and superstitions outlined here, so I'm settling for the qualifier that every block is different.  It's still a load of blocks--it's 29 blocks long already, and will be almost that many wide.

This isn't a fancy quilt so I'll probably cheat some on quilting it.  As much as I'd like to outline every block--at least once, if not twice--by hand I think realistically I'll do this (with the gray lines representing stitching) on the machine.  I'll get look and feel that are similar to the outlining I'd like to do, but withe a hope of completing it sometime this century:

Yes, I'll be leaving the side edges sawtoothed.  Part of the appeal, right?

The saving grace of one-patch quilts like this is that you can use pretty much any hideous fabrics you can scrounge, because if you cut them up into small pieces and scatter them around, the ugliness of the prints breaks up and they end up looking charmingly scrappy.  There are some frighteningly bad ideas in fabric design in this, but you don't notice because you don't look at the blocks one-by-one.