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!

Playing with Firecrackers {Weekend Update}

Since my husband was out of town from last Wednesday until today, that meant I had oodles of unadulterated sewing time (and binging Gilmore Girls.) I have lots of finished, almost-finished, and new things to show over the next few days, hooray!

But, as a teaser, today is sneak peak day!

First up, is my primary Little Firecracker quilt. When last I posted about this quilt, I had just finished all of the blocks.

I also shared this finished preview shot of the quilt top on Instagram a while back:

And by "a while back" I mean April. I need to up my organization -- good thing Santa might be bringing me a Quilter's Planner!

Since I want to try to get *BOTH* of my Little Firecracker quilts done by Thanksgiving (if not earlier!) getting both of them quilted was my big project for my solo retreat weekend. AND I SUCCEEDED! I'll be sharing all about my secondary Little Firecracker's progress in a separate post since I hardly took any pictures of that one in progress - it needs a little attention of its own!

On the primary Little Firecracker quilt, I did a branching curl design.

For the backing, I used a three yard cut of a large stripe border print in navy and green (a little traditional but matches the quilt perfectly) pieced with a pink and red leaf print on white. I strongly considered buying flannel for these quilts, but with the odd size (55 inches square) I would end up with a lot of backing waste so I opted to use older large cuts in my stash for both quilts. Pictures coming in the finished post!

For the binding, I used a dot print with a dark red background with multi colored dots that coordinate with my quilt colors. I started hand stitching the binding to the back during the Walking Dead on Sunday night but didn't make a ton of progress. 

In other news, I am starting idea-gathering for a quilt along next year. If you have opinions and suggestions on what you would like to see or do in a quilt along here at Little Bunny Quilts, please share those in the comments! I love to hear what people are thinking!

Sharing at Fabric Tuesday, Scraptastic Tuesday, and Needle and Thread Thursday!

WIP Wednesday: Get {Fire}crackin'

Thanks to some evening baseball games, I have been able to finish up the 100 square units from my wedges for my primary Little Firecrackers quilt. I realized that I could cut my white wedges from 7 inch strips rather than 7.5 inch strips, so I was able to stretch my background fabric all the way to the end for this one. (Still need to order more Moda Bella White for the other one!)

I went ahead and got all of the block units sorted into groups of four that will be sewn into the final blocks. Trying to pull from the seven different block piles randomly would probably just end in disaster. Hopefully I have mixed up the different units enough so that there aren't too many obvious repeats within the quilt!

I also decided to sew together the blocks differently than in the original pattern -- the original pattern has you sew your four units together with the small points in the middle rather than your "burst" in the middle. This way, I'll have less pinning and easing to do when I sew my blocks into rows. It will also hopefully make it easier to arrange blocks since none of the colored fabrics will be touching each other.

One block down, 24 to go!

Sharing at Fabric Tuesday, Sew Cute Tuesday, Oh Scrap! and Let's Bee Social!

Little Firecrackers {WIP Wednesday}

While a lot of my time has been recently devoted to my upcoming Moda Bake Shop quilt that I can't show you just yet, I have been working on not one, but two stash/scrap buster quilts using the Firecracker pattern from Fat Quarter Shop. I made a quilt with this pattern last fall for the blog hop, but I thought this would be a good pattern to use up the very large stash of 2.5 inch strips that I have collected over the years.

Instead of using 5 strips per set as in the pattern, I decided to go with 4 strips per set. When I made my original quilt, some of the trimmed blocks ended up with little to none of the fifth strip showing at all, so I decided that I would go ahead and make my blocks all slightly smaller. I was able to cut 15 units out of each strip set so I had to add a half of an extra strip set in addition to the six sets shown above to reach the 100 wedges that I need for the quilt.

Here are all of my wedges for the first quilt:

For both quilts I started with a "focal" fabric that I had four or so strips of, and then pulled additional fabrics to coordinate. I started with a yellow background floral print and pulled reds, grass greens, true blues, and a few other yellows. This one I haven't started making any of the actual blocks yet.

For the other quilt, I also started with a yellow background floral print, but pulled teals, pinks, olives, and oranges to match. This one I started making blocks and trimming them -- however I realized that I didn't have enough background fabric to finish all of the blocks a little too late in the process! I got about half way through and will be going to get some more of the correct white this weekend.

Surprisingly, even using one less strip than the pattern, I only had to cut my squares a half of an inch smaller to accommodate for the change!

Sharing at Building Blocks Tuesday and Let's Bee Social!