Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part VI

A few months ago, I found myself with two new Babies of Note entering the world, and figured it was time to get cracking on the ol' quilting front.  When I took stock of the works-in-progress department, which was in considerable disarray, I eventually determined that I had one baby quilt face left from the "Eight Quick Children's Quilts" series.  It was the one I'd called #8, but that's not why it was the last one.  It was the last one because it was the boring one.

Well, obviously you can't give a baby a boring quilt.  It might screw up their development!  So, after mulling over the situation for a bit, I decided to add some warmth and visual interest by intercutting it with some bright orange stripes.  "Bright orange stripes," with the orange contained in a thin dark outline and the stripes overlapping each other in a weaving pattern, was an idea I used to tolerable effect to liven up another lackluster pattern, in 2014's "Jennifer Challenge Quilt II."

Did it do the trick this time?  You make the call!

The parents like it, that's the important thing.  It's possible that the baby herself will weigh in eventually, but it's still a little early for that.  (If you just can't wait to see a toddler be adorable about a quilt, though, I encourage you to revisit the video in last Friday's post.)

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #8
Serial Number: 69

Dimensions: 50" x 36"

Batting: large scrap piece of commercial batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: Close machine-quilted grid.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: May 8, 2016

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part IV

"But Michael," I hear you asking. "Didn't you kind of jump from 'Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part III' (in May 2013) to 'Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part V' (this week)? What about Part IV?" Good catch, you!

The reason is, I already kind of did Part IV on my other blog awhile ago. Um, April 2014. How time does fly! Here's what I said there, at the time.

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I haven't been doing much quilting.  I don't know if I even identify myself as a quilter anymore.  But I did finish an actual quilt recently.
 

It is made from scrap and recycled fabric, and has lots of jolly frogs and bugs and whatnot.  Its new owner is the new daughter of the one-time Dork of this blog, G.  Here she is, hanging out with a stripy friend:

 
What does she think of her new bedding?  Well, let's be frank, she's probably not doing much critical thinking yet, being still pretty new to the open air.  But who knows, perhaps she will find herself like-minded with Natasha, who is a bit older and 2500 miles away but who also has a Michael5000 quilt.  Natasha's mom recently wrote to say:

Just wanted to let you know that your quilt has been blanket # 1 in Tashi's crib for the last several months.  It is not too clingy, too hot or too cold (not to mention quite beautiful and interesting to look at).  Every night and nap, I say, "Do you want Michael's blanket?"  and Tash says, "Yes, Michael's blanket."  And I pull it over her.  Then if it's colder out I say, "Do you want Ruthie's blanket too?"  And She says, "No, Michael's."

Ain't that adorable?  It's almost enough to make me want to make more quilts.  For Natasha, anyway. 

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So yeah, that's what I had to say back in 2014.  But obviously the State of the Craft readership, if there is one, is going to want more details than THAT!

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The Specs (G's Daughter's Quilt)

Pompous Title: "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #2"
Serial Number: 63 

Dimensions: did not record.
Batting: did not record.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel, mostly crazy zebra stripes.  
Quilting: Diagonals across individual blocks.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: March 2014 


Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.
Provenance: Quilt is in adorable use.  I mean, check this out.  It's almost ridiculous.

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Right on! Let's get a look at Natasha's quilt, too!

The Specs (Natasha's Quilt)

Pompous Title: "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #1"
Serial Number: 62

Dimensions: 45 1/2 x 56 1/2
Batting: Extravagantly pieced scraps of commercial batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: A very wavy grid in metallic orange.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012 


Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.
Provenance: A few months ago, owner's mom said that Natasha is still into her quilt.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part V

I suppose you could say more cutting things about a fellow than that he has fallen down on the job of documenting his quilt output.

Right?

Well. I suppose the most pressing question on everybody's mind is "Gosh, Michael, whatever happened to those eight children's quilts you started knocking out four years ago?"

Why, in fact I finished the last of them last month! But this post isn't about this one.  This one is about the third-to-last of them I finished, which I gave away sometime in early 2013.

In case it has slipped your mind, this series was all thrown together from my stock of premade squares, and I used mostly checkerboard patterns.  Obviously we're not talking about particularly adventuresome design concepts, here.  That being said, I really like this one!  The rich maroon and green trim (which was just some salvage bedding) lends some dignity to the proceedings, and though I say it myself the off-kilter diagonal quilting was an inspired choice.

I also like that this one has a subtle theme.  There are four Asian-style dragons scattered through the piece (they are in light blocks, if you want to go looking for them).  That made it appropriate for the Bhutanese-American little girl that the blanket ended up with.  Look up the Bhutanese flag if you don't believe me.

The back was pieced together from a riot of smallish flannel scraps.  Again, of the eight quilts, this one seemed best aimed at the household it ended up in.  Doesn't it look kind of South Asian?  Also, if you look closely at the back, you can notice something that I had completely forgotten about: I interrupted the quilting pattern in order to pick out the four dragon squares.  Again, I have to congratulate the 2012-13 version of Michael5000.  He seems like he was pretty on the ball, to judge from this quilt.

The Specs

 
Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #7, "Four Dragons"  
Serial Number: 68

Dimensions: 54" x 41"

Batting: did not record.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread at 30 degree diagonal.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012, according to my suspect records

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Provenance: As of this writing, still in active use as intended.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part III

Last summer, I rattled out faces for a number of children's quilts (the number was "eight," in fact). After an epic excavation of my workspace, I have confirmed that three are still under construction. Four are already in the hands of various adorable children, as described here and here. Make it five.  This one went out to one of my work partner's three year old girl last week.  He claims she likes it.  He claims, and has supported with photographic evidence, that she insists on sleeping on top of it, rather than underneath it.  He claims she wakes up in the middle of the night and talks to the animals in it.  I am unclear whether he sees this as a positive development. The pictures aren't very good -- that's what happens when you don't check image quality before you give 'em away.

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #5, "Green Checkerboard"  
Serial Number: 66

Dimensions: 51" x 46"

Batting: Pieced scrap batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  

Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.  The top thread is a metallic, a first for me.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: February 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part II

Last month, I wrote about making a short stack of childrens' quilts and giving the first few away.  Last night a third one found its new owner, who quickly got tangled up in it and crashed to the hard floor on the back of his head.  I thought this might lead to mixed feelings about the new blanket, but no, he seemed to like it.  In particular, he liked the frogs.

I originally laid this one out just from squares of plaid and checkerboard fabrics, and still think of it as "the plaid one."  Mrs.5000 pointed out from over my shoulder that it was looking awfully somber for a child's quilt, and that's when the frogs and other critters started making their appearance.  Framing it with some scraps of blue and white stripey fabric I had lying around was a fortunate inspiration.  It's hard to see in this crappy photo, but I'm especially proud of my mitering job at the corners.  The binding is from a scrap piece of, if I'm not mistaken, linen; we'll see how that works out.

Unfortunately, I gave it away not noticing that there were unburied threads, but fortunately the new owner lives nearby and I can make a repair house call.

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #4, "Plaid."

Serial Number: 64

Dimensions: 55" x 47"

Batting: Pieced scrap batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part I

Like many people who have a "making" hobby, I have a long "to-do" list of projects, some partially finished, some of them fleshed-out design concepts waiting to be brought to life, some of them really just pieces of fabric or found fragments looking for a home, and some just general notions of things I'd like to do.  I bet that, given an hour to paw through my notes and storage compartments, I could come up with more than 100 quilts on my theoretical to-do list.  Most of them will of course never be made.

Every year or so, I decide to draw up a priority list of which quilts I really want to make progress on, like some sort of needle-arts air traffic controller assigning landing slots at the great destination airport of all projects.  This kind of list usually structures my creative activity for four to six weeks before all discipline breaks down and I just work on whatever I'm most engaged in.  But the interesting thing is -- and I think I am completely normal in this respect -- it's not like older concepts progress steadily towards the front of the line, and new ideas take a number at the back of the queue.  Instead, a new idea is more likely to jump immediately into production, and the older projects I've been intending to start for ten years are no closer getting underway than they've ever been.

Anyway, I think what happened six weeks ago is that I was making some symbolic gestures related to the organization of my materials stash, and realized that I had saved up rather a lot of 4", 4 1/2", and 5" squares.  I make squares in those three sizes when I end up with smallish pieces of fabric that I know won't be especially useful to me: juvenile or novelty prints, ugly prints, border fabrics, "cheater" fabrics, reproduction or genuinely old-fashioned fabrics, and so on.  I can make blocks with these, but I can also use them pretty readily to make quilt faces that are just simple grids of squares.

Like so:

Face for "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #8."

I brought my boxes of these pre-cut squares downstairs, with no particular agenda in mind, and just started dealing them onto the dining table like I was playing solitaire.  Over the course of three or four evenings, I ended up laying out ten separate quilt faces.  And since then, since these have been pretty simple pieces, easy to work with, I've been able to get six of them completely finished.

Last weekend, we took all six of them over to the home of some young people of our acquaintance -- and by "young people," here, I mean people who still depend on their parents (also friends of ours) to dress and undress them.  I wasn't especially expecting that they would be too too excited about a gift of bedding, but when the little girl was asked if she would like to pick a blanket for herself after dinner, she indicated in the affirmative.  And it turned out that after dinner, before anyone could bring up the subject or come up with some sort of system, she marched over, pointed at one, and said "Can I have this one?"  "Yep!" I said.  "You can!  Here, it's yours!"  Whereupon, her brother came over and said "Can I have one too?"  "You sure can," I said.  "I want the black one," he said.  And so I gave it to him.  And they ran over and spread their quilts on the floor side by side, and started playing a game that involved running in circles on the quilts and shrieking.  I felt that the whole thing had gone off magnificently.

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The One the Little Girl Chose

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #4, "Pastel."

Serial Number: 65

Dimensions: 54" x 47"

Batting: Pieced Scrap batting.

Backing: Flannel from a damaged fitted sheet, recovered at the Bins.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

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The One the Little Boy Chose

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #6, "Stars and Planets."

Serial Number: 67

 

 

Dimensions: 56" x 43"

 

 

Batting: A wonky piece of scrap batting.

Backing: Vertical strips of scrap flannel recovered from the backings of previous quilts.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

 

 

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

 

 

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.