Bird Pillows

 

I made a couple of larger birds into a pillow.  The pillows are about 18 inches square.  I can see a few more of these in the future.

 

The flock has grown to 42 and that’s enough birds.  Now to assemble them. I need to trim them and sew them together. I won’t use sashing but may insert a bit of floral fabric randomly to add interest.

The Flock so Far

 The flock is growing slowly.  I have added a couple facing the opposite direction.  Unfortunately I only have enough blue backing to make one more bird.  The rest will be off white or pale green or a mixture of both.

Birds of a Feather…

  I am making a flock of birds which may or may not end up being a quilt.  It’s a fun way to use up a few more scraps.

Scrap control

 I decided that since my scrap tub was overflowing again, it was time to make another  scrap quilt.  I sewed together some long strips and then crosscut them to make strips.  I had a large piece of backing fabric in light beiges so I used that as sashing.  This is where I ran out of sashing fabric.  I’ll put a border on using a different beige and then decide if I’m going to buy backing fabric or do some more piecing.  The worst part is that the tub of scraps is still overflowing.

T-shirt Quilt

  

My cousin’s husband, John, is an avid runner and cyclist. When he saw some of my quilts he asked if I’d be able to make a t-shirt quilt.  I had never made one but thought I might as well give it a try.  

 

 The hardest part was cutting up all those nice new t-shirts. I measured the logos, sorted by size and colour and pinned a number on each piece. Then I made a graph arrangement of the sizes and colours.  There were 37 shirts so it became a large quilt!

I spent quite a lot of time arranging on my design wall.  I loosely followed the graph but ended up making some changers.  I decided that the pieces needed to be separated somehow because there were so many whites but not all the same shade. It was a toss up between red and black but I went with red in the end because some of the blocks were black.

 

It looks great on the queen size bed. I was a bit nervous about quilting over some of the logos which were quite stiff but my Bernina handled them perfectly.

John was quite happy with the finished quilt.

Getting There

 A few years ago at a quilt show I bought templates to make curved blocks.  The package only had the template for the larger blocks and I thought they made an interesting quilt. However, a few years later I found the small templates so I was able to make the quilt illustrated in the photo which was included with the large templates. This is my second attempt. I have been sewing the blocks into rows as I go because it’s very complicated and super easy to make mistakes. Yes there has been some ripping.  I also sewed every two rows together so now I have to complete sewing the rows and then decide on a border or borders. I have spent the last hour dealing with the scraps on the table. Some are discarded because they are too small, some large ones are sorted into colour families and a few ended up in the big tub of little scraps. Between Covid and the cold weather here (wind chills of -44 for a couple of days) I’ve gotten a lot of sewing done.