Two Little Quilts for Two Little Guys



Not long ago, I finished up these two little quilts.

I may have mentioned bits and pieces of these quilts in the past ... 

The one on the left showed up a few weeks ago when I posted about Playing with Orange Fabric.

 The one on the right was in progress a few months ago, and I blogged about it in a post called Another Shirt Quilt Project FMQ-QAYG-style.

These fun little quilts were gifts for my friend Christy's newest little sons.

I mentioned a few months ago (see this post) that my friend Christy would be adopting a little boy from Eastern Europe. As it turns out, God has allowed Christy and her husband to adopt TWO little boys!



So, of course, I wanted to make the little guys quilts to welcome them home.

These quilts are smallish sizes - The square one is 38" x 38", and the other one is a little narrower than that, and a little longer ... The boys are 1 and 3, but small for their ages, so I wanted quilts that would be little, but not babyish. 

Introducing my new favorite combo: Shirts and Sheets! (Perfect for Guy Quilts, if you ask me!)

The squares on this one are all cut from shirts; the beige sashing and binding was a sheet.

Putting together a Quilt-As-You-Go quilt was easier than I expected. (See more on "quilt-as-you-go" here and here and here.)

For one thing, quilting a 10½" square is SO much easier than quilting an 80" x 80" square! Because of this, I've been enjoying "the quilting" part of quilt-making a lot more lately.

For another thing, the method in this video works great for putting the pieces together.

And the orange fabric was a sheet (and so was the green on the binding & back of the orange quilt) , while the remaining triangles were all shirt fabrics.

  

I love the bright, happy look of the shirt-plaids & solids!

  

I though how fun it would be to take pictures of these quilts outside, on the clothesline.

It was windier than I thought it would be, so, not surprisingly, I ended up with a lot of this ...

... and this ... which made me laugh! I did a lot of waiting around for the wind to settle, so I could snap pics really quick before the wind picked back up!

The quilting details for the quilt-as-you-go squares were in this post.

For the triangles quilt, I decided to go with a spiral design, because I figured spirals would contrast nicely with the angular lines of the patchwork.

If you look closely at the middle spiral in the picture below, you'll see the "spiral" that's probably my favorite. Even though most of my spirals were tolerably round, and some of them were pretty near perfect, THIS one ... wasn't! I thought about taking it out and redoing ... But more and more, I realize that I'm quilting better and better. AND, more and more, I'm realizing that some things don't require stressed-out perfection. It's O.K.; it's unique. And it was made by a human, and not a robot. :-)

Speaking of favorites, I LOVE this puzzle-quilting on this block in the quilt-as-you-go quilt. Like I mentioned in other posts about this, the puzzle-quilting inspiration came from here.

Probably my very favorite block in the quilt-as-you-go quilt was this rocking-horse one, the last one I finished. Traced this little rocking-horse from a printable coloring page (I think it was this one) and added some details to make it work as a quilting design. Because the little guy getting this quilt happens to have a thing for rocking horses.

I finished off the little quilts with the boys' names ... stitching them in like the lettering I did at the end of this post and the end of this post.

Many congratulations to Christy and her family on the newest additions to their wonderful family!