Two Little Firecrackers {Finished}

Today I'm sharing not one, but two finished quilts! Say hello (and goodbye) to my Little Firecrackers, which I have affectionately calling Primary and Secondary based on their color schemes. 

You can click here to see all of the posts on these quilts, but in short, I am making these quilts for the college girls I volunteer with who are both leaving their offices at the end of this semester!

First up: Primary. This fabric pull centered around the primary colors, obviously, but I believe my starting fabric is the yellow background fabric with red roses (I believe it is Lecien). All of these are strip pieced from jelly roll sized strips that I had in my stash. I made 7 strip sets to cut the 100 wedges for this quilt. 

You can check out the Firecrackers pattern at the Fat Quarter Shop and the ruler I used is here. (Not affiliate links!) The only difference is that I used 4 strips for my strip sets instead of 5 and I cut my blocks a half an inch smaller than in the pattern. I was able to stretch my fabric much further this way!

For the quilting on the primary quilt I used a branching curly cue pattern with lots of backstitching to give it a branching effect rather than a chained effect. While the quilting is not terribly dense, the backstitching does require quite a lot of thread!

For the backing I used a 3 yard cut of a flourish strip pattern in navy and green that had been hanging out in my stash for a very, very long time. I had to add a chunk of an old Denyse Schmidt print to avoid overly piecing the back. The binding is a darker red polka dot print with white, tan, and light blue dots.

Next up: Secondary! This one is based around another yellow floral print, but this one had different tones of greens (olives rather than grassy greens, as well as pinks and oranges. I also pulled in some periwinkle and aqua.

I did end up using a few different white/off white fabrics in this one, but they are not as different as this picture might suggest. This is the downside of only having 30 minutes of daylight after I come home from work!

For this quilt I used a meander with little five petaled flowers along the meanders. This one took much less time since it had almost no backstitching!

For the backing on this one, I used a two yard cut of the purple scroll print and the leftover large pieces from the backing of my Starburst quilt. I also used the blue print as the binding. Despite it being a very large scale print, I think the binding isn't dominated by any one color -- with the fabric's pattern, no one section is really sticks out on the binding -- just a great blending of all of the colors and patterns!

I am so happy to have these done and to give them to my girls very soon!

Stats:
Pattern: Firecrackers by It's Sew Emma/Fat Quarter shop (modified)
Size: 55x55

Sharing at Finish it Up Friday! Don't forget to enter my Dreamscape giveaway!