In the Nick of Time

I'm making healthy progress on my goal to complete quilts for each of my nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews by Christmas. A week before our Thanksgiving trip to visit eight of the quilt recipients, I still had two more quilts to go for that group. I'd been diligently working on Skins, but the dense quilting and the huge size and thick loft of the quilt were taking more time than I had and preventing me from reaching eight finished quilts by Thanksgiving. (I still have three more quilts to finish by Christmas, or a few days before, so they may be mailed to recipients in time to spend at least one night in wrapping paper and beneath a tree.)

When I first began teaching The Lizard to use my sewing machine (before it broke and fortunately was repaired six weeks later), he used leftover jelly roll strips from a dress I made for last Christmas to craft a race quilt. The strips featured my very own Spoonflower design and 10 shades of Kona cotton. When he first began piecing, he wanted to try to duplicate the design of my dress.


Just a few strips into his project, he decided to do his own thing, and his striping came out so much different and so much more unique than mine! Enough leftovers remained for a second quilt top, so he whipped out another one even more unusual than the first. Then the flimsies took a four-month vacation, just chilling in our spare bedroom, waiting for someone to be inspired to do something with them.

With my Thanksgiving deadline hammering away at me, I decided to use both race tops in one truly reversible lap quilt. I sandwiched them, quickly machine-quilted a few diagonal lines and bound the quilt in one night after a challenging full day of work.

The real quilt number seven was done! (I'd mistakenly thought the previous quilt, Turtle Sherbet, was seven and was horrified to discover I still had to make two more finished quilts instead of just one.) I wish I'd had enough lavender strips left over to put a 4- or 5-inch sashing on each side of this quilt to make it a little bigger, but a 38-inch square top would be just fine, as far as the recipient niece is concerned. (Lily said purple is her favorite color!)

She absolutely loves the reversible nature of this quilt as much as I do!






Remarkably, The Lizard finished another quilt that same day, too! His newest is made with leftovers from lizard and southwest bandanas I've made for him during the last 10 years, as well as fabrics I'd fashioned into dresses up to two decades ago and shirt fabrics from when my kids were small, a few years before Goth replaced country in their fashion taste. The quilt backing is faux denim flannel, which ties in nicely with some of the western shirts I whipped up for my kids 15 to 20 years ago. The kids wore faded jeans almost every day!




I needed one more quilt, and I needed it in just a couple of days. One more time, I went through the layered but unquilted WIPs on my quick rack to see if anything might be feasible for a quick finish. The fireworks fabric I designed and had printed by Spoonflower jumped out at me. I pulled out all my scraps, and literally whipped through log cabin-like rounds of black and rainbow blocks until the quilt was big enough for a kid's lap.

The quilt back was created from the remainder of the plum Halloween costume leftovers from another life. The purple wasn't quite wide enough, so I extended it with more rainbow scraps. Enough rainbow scraps remained for my first pieced and fanciest binding ever. In two nights, July Special Effects was done, and so was I!!! Well, except for the quilts that must be mailed...

And that blasted purple fabric from a quarter of a century ago finally is GONE! Not one piece remains!!! Yippee!!!










Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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