See my last post for background and the first 10 blankets.
Number 11? – Jan 29, 2024
I had mentioned in my last post that I had a quilt top pieced by a family member, but it wasn’t finished, so I would finish it.
First, I believe this was meant as a wedding quilt. The pieces were hearts, flowers, bells (you know, wedding bells), cakes, and birds. I removed the cakes, hoping that would make it less wedding-y. I had started by machine sewing the applique pieces on, but it didn’t look good, so I hand stitched them with a blanket stitch. 
In my quilting days, I used to hand quilt my blankets. In order to finish these within the next 50 years, I’ll need to machine quilt them, which I’ve never done before with success. I have a different machine than I had back then. I bought a free motion quilt (FMQ) foot for the machine. I watched a quick tutorial and with the confidence of someone who doesn’t know better, I jumped in. Some of the parts that I quilted at first leave a lot to be desired. However, I think I got pretty good by the end. I also tried out my walking foot for quilting “in the ditch” around each pieced rectangle. Same thing, janky in the beginning, but not bad by the end.
I also used to hand stitch on the binding. Or at least machine stitch it to one side, then hand stitch it onto the other. Again, in the interest of time, I need to figure out how to neatly machine sew the binding on both sides. I tried on this quilt. It was pretty disastrous. So all those issues combined: wedding theme, poor quilting in spots, poor binding all around, plus my usual mistakes here and there… mean I won’t be donating this blanket. My cat however, has happily claimed it for herself. And I learned a LOT on this quilt, so hopefully the next ones will be more successful.
Blanket #12 – Jan 30, 2024
Back to moss stitch! This is once again a Caron Anniversary cake. This time in “Bold Blue Dots”. The edging is Bernat Blanket in “Country Blue”. I used an 11.5mm hook, and the final size was actually 60″ x 40″. I say actually since it may be the first time a blanket ended up the intended size. I don’t love “Bold Blue Dots”, but it was on clearance, and it is very soft. I think the edging helps it out.
Blanket #13! February 13, 2024
This quilt was a long time coming. Really. I cut out the squares in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was big into quilting then, but at some point (likely when I had two small kids running around) I stopped. I was going through my scraps to start a new quilt and found all these cut squares! Some had already been pieced into the four-squares. Yay past me! Back when I was quilting, 1930s reproduction fabrics were popular and I LOVED them. Making this quilt made me so happy. It’s also my first successful free motion quilted blanket! And I successfully figured out machine sewing the binding! I’m very very pleased with this one. Finished size 45″ x 56″.
Blanket #14! March 4, 2024
Top left: the finished quilt. Top right: the back. Bottom left: close up of the quilting. Bottom right: the top just after piecing with large scissors to show scale
A family member (the same one as the unfinished quilt top from blanket #11) gave me a huge stash of fabric when she downsized. I went looking for “fat quarter friendly” patterns and came across Yellow Brick Road from Atkinson designs. I ordered that and a few others. I received my order, but it was the wrong thing! Instead I received a booklet with different patterns. While I waited to get my correct order, I figured I’d make “Layer Cake” from the book that was delivered. It was great fun to go “shopping” in the fabric stash. Layer Cake uses 15 different fat quarters, so I had to find 15 fabrics in the stash that would coordinate. I love how these came together.
The pattern itself was fairly simple to do. Cut lots of strips, sew them together, then cut into blocks. I did make one critical mistake of not checking the first set of sewn together strips for size before doing all of the others. They were a bit short and I had to really press them out to get them to size.
Tracking costs, I purchased $15 of machine quilting thread in blue for this one.
Finished size: 50″ x 62″ (I think my largest yet for Project Linus)
Blanket #15 – March 10, 2024
Top left: full quilt. Top right: up close of the quilting. Bottom left: scissors for scale. Bottom right: back of quilt
This was the Yellow Brick Road pattern I mentioned in the last blanket update. This pattern was very fat quarter friendly. Coupled with my Creative Grids Stripology ruler that I received for Christmas, this was very quick to cut out. Piecing went relatively “quick” as well (relative to other quilts). Once again I used fabrics from my relative’s donated stash. I did purchase two fat quarters for the binding since I didn’t have any more blues of the right hue. The two fat quarters (plus some extras that fell in my cart!), the patterns I purchased, and some more thread, came to $52. Really pleased with how this turned out. Finished size 64″ x 46″.
Blanket #16 – March 15, 2024
The top left photo is the quilt laid across my king size bed, if that helps with scale.
I love this one! Love, love, love. The family member that gave me their fabric stash is a huge fan of orange. For over a year, I’ve been obsessed with orange and teal as a color combo. I crocheted a hat in those colors, I’ve done numerous paintings with those colors. When I saw the Morning, Noon, and Night pattern that transitions from a contrast color to a dark color, I knew it would be perfect.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough teal fabric, so I did have to buy some fat quarters, as well as fabric for the backing and binding. I also was close to running out of batting. And more basting spray. So $89 later and I was ready to go. I also purchased more rotary blades and machine needles, coincidentally another $89.
Finished size is 60″ x 76″, definitely the largest I’ve done for Project Linus. I can’t really go larger and still machine quilt, so I think this is the max for now.
Amusingly, I was watching the current season of Survivor and their buff color is orange and teal, so I’m guess I’m on trend. Ha!
Blanket #17 – March 19, 2024
Another Yellow Brick Road, but maybe call this one Yellow Brick Road through the woods. I wanted to do something less floral and a bit more subdued. My family member stash had lots of browns and greens, perfect! Including several yards of the fabric I used for the backing. So no additional money spent on this one! Well, except for the even feed foot guide, but that’s “gear” and I’m not counting that towards my Project Linus blankets. It was GREAT to use. It attaches to your even feed foot and allows you to make a straight line off of another nearby straight line, so I used the seams of rows to guide off of. I saw this randomly spaced quilting lines pattern on another quilt and wanted to try it out. I love it! Though it can be difficult to be purposefully random.
I also tried to time how long each step took. I forgot to turn the timer on a few times, but my best estimate is that this quilt took 8 hours start to finish, spread out over several days. I got this pattern because I had heard it was a quick one, and the rumors are true! Especially my second time around. I’ll definitely be making at least a few more of this pattern for Project Linus.
Finished size 64″ x 46″.
Blanket #18 – March 25, 2024
This is another quilt that has been years in the making. I saw a rainbow bargello quilt and loved it. I found a “pattern” on the internet. I went out to buy two jelly rolls. Jelly rolls are sets of pre-cut strips in various fabric sets. The pattern called for two matching jelly rolls. The store didn’t have two matching jelly rolls, so in my impatience, I figured two coordinating jelly rolls could be combined to make two matching rolls. The pattern I had found was really more of a blog entry on how to do it. Not detailed instructions, and definitely didn’t include warnings or gotchas. I began sewing my strips together.
Now, a short digression here. First, quilting, like baking, very often needs to be precise. I however, quilt like I bake, which is to sometimes wing it. This sometimes works out. It sometimes does not. So the first issue was that because these were two different jelly rolls, even though they both SAID they were 2 1/2″ wide, they were not the same size. Sometimes that wouldn’t matter, it very much matters in this quilt. The second issue was that I didn’t read all of the comments on the blog post. Especially the comments that recommended sewing in alternating directions. Meaning if you sew strip A and strip B and start at the “top”. Then when you sew strip B to strip C, you should start at the bottom. Not alternating can cause the quilt top to get a bit wonky. My next issue is that I’m lazy. So I don’t always pin (or clip) things. Again, most of the time, this is fine. It was not fine. So you sew all the strips together forming many columns (if you think of a spreadsheet). Then you slice into rows. Then you offset the rows and sew back together. Again, alternating sewing direction and pinning. I did neither for my rows or my columns. I ended up with a trapezoid rather than a rectangle. I did my best to square it up, but I didn’t want to cut off all that work.
Anyway, the purchasing of the rolls and half of the strip sewing was done years ago. I put it away unfinished. Pulled it out at the beginning of this Project Linus journey. Saw that it was going wonky and put it away. It’s been stopped and started so many times.
I FINALLY finished the top. And for some crazy reason decided I should quilt each color in matching thread. Which maybe turned out to be the only good decision I made. I love how it looks. I love the back of the quilt almost as much as the front, which is depressing since it’s really just four pieces of fabric sewn together (oh yeah because I screwed up and cut the backing wrong).
Note to my future self, if you ever decide to do this again: get two of the same rolls, get an actual pattern, sew alternate directions, pin things, lock end stitches (with so many small pieces and handling, they began to come apart), start with the big wedge not the small, and possibly use a walking foot even for piecing.
Finished size, a trapezoid, ROUGHLY 60″ “square”.
Blanket #19! – June 23, 2024
Around mid-April things got a little hectic around here. I was out of town for 19 days over three separate trips. My daughter’s college had a pinning ceremony, my son graduated high school. So there were two quilts that had been cut out and blocks sewn together, then abandoned on my sewing table.
I finally finished one of them. Even though this quilt isn’t my style in terms of color or pattern, I absolutely love it. I wish the photos were more true to color, it’s brighter and cheerier than the photos show. Unfortunately, I can’t get better photos without taking the quilt outside and I don’t want to risk getting it dirty.
Yellow Brick Road pattern again. These were all fabrics I had, either from my family donation, or in my stash. I had yards and yards of the floral fabric. I suspect they were going to be curtains. So I matched the other fabrics to colors in the florals. I finished it with a meander quilting pattern, except on the flowers, which I outlined or did flower-y shapes.
Finished size 47″ x 65″
Blanket #20! – July 4, 2024
Do not adjust your screen! This one is black and white! (Please do pardon the creases, I was so excited to take a pic I couldn’t wait for it to settle after being in the dryer overnight). This was the other one that was mostly done before I went on hiatus. I wanted to do another one “less floral”. A couple of new things for this one. I saw this pattern and thought I could figure it out without actually using a pattern, and I was correct! Just a little bit of math and planning and I did it. The second new thing is that this one has a binding made up of several fabrics instead of just one.
I love how the quilting came out. Although it was a pain to do! While very simple, it required turning the quilt on every one of those corners. Even inside the squares, I decided to do a square spiral, which took even more turning.
A few purchases were necessary for this quilt. I didn’t have enough black and white, non-floral fabrics, so I ended up buying a BOX of fabric on Facebook marketplace. A lovely woman was downsizing her home and therefor her stash. She had so many boxes for sale, luckily/unluckily, I stuck to just this one. Total price: $25 for way more fabric than I used for this quilt. I bought some new thread. I’m a big fan of Juki Junkies and have learned a lot about my machine from them. They sell and recommend Glide thread, so I bought a 4-pack to try out. That was $20. Though I’m maybe halfway through one spool after this quilt. Lastly, I had to buy fabric for the backing as I didn’t have enough of any single fabric. $22 (with some fabric leftover).
Finished size: 55″ x 64″
Kathy Eager Creative 