Little Lady Quilt {Finished Baby Quilt}

I have a finish to share today, and I'm going to embarrass myself in the process!

I have been in a major "sort it, use it, organize it, clear it out" mood with my sewing room and quilting supplies. Before we moved, I did not get to to the reorganization and purge that I envisioned -- because we moved up our moving date, everything went from the shelves and bins straight to the moving boxes and then back on the shelves.

So imagine my surprise when I was looking for something else and I found this baby quilt top at the bottom of a pile of projects:

I had to go back three and a half years to find when I had made this quilt top. This was two apartments ago! I made this quilt top using the Jelly Roll Jam 2 pattern from the Fat Quarter shop using scrappy fat quarters left over from other baby quilt projects and I just made as many blocks as I could make with the scraps that I had.

This project somehow has escaped being placed on my running WIP list; I decided that instead of adding it to the list "officially" I would do my best to finish it up in October.

I found a piece of fabric big enough to use for backing left over from my Summer on the Coast quilt. I guess that I had really over-estimated how much backing and binding fabric I needed!

I didn't find light brown thread in my stash that I liked (the ones I have are too yellow/too gold), so I just used white thread to quilt this one instead. I decided to use a red solid fat quarter to make bias binding for this quilt.

Zippidee do dah -- a finished baby quilt!

Sharing at Peacock Party and Brag about your Beauties! And Needle and Thread Thursday too!

Quilt Stats:
Name: Little Lady Quilt
Pattern: Jelly Roll Jam 2 from Fat Quarter shop
Fabrics: fat quarter bundle of baby girl fabrics
Techniques: strip piecing, free motion quilting
Quilting: Free motion meanders
Size: 40" x 36"
Batting: scrap batting
Started: February 2016 (yikes!)
Finished: October 2019 
Future: Baby quilt/TBD

Patriotic Dresden {June IBA project}

I've finally managed to dedicate some time to working on my Island Batik Ambassador project for this month!

My original plan has been slightly modified -- more in name and less in execution. Rather than making a mini quilt to hang for the patriotic holidays, I'm now planning to make a round table topper for my patio table. The rest of my plan is the same -- a Dresden Plate with strip pieced wedges on a white background. As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics, Aurifil thread, and Hobbs batting to use and share with you!

After measuring my patio table, I decided that my wedges needed to be 12.5" long, so my strip pieced sections will be made of six 2.5" strips. My strip sets ended up looking quite wonky since I was working from scraps.

I cut 12 wedges from my scrappy strip sets.

Next came creating the points of my wedges.

I then sewed the wedges into sets of three and then my plate quarters into a single plate.

At this point, my Dresden plate is about 24" across and I cut a 30 inch square of white Island Batik solid for my background. I used blue thread to applique the plate to the background fabric. Lots of pins were required!

I used an older piece of Island Batik yardage in teal for the backing and used white thread to do the quilting. I quilted stars and loops to go along with my patriotic color scheme.

After quilting, I measured approximately 2 inches from the tip of each point to create a circle for trimming my square-ish piece into a circle. Next up is preparing the bias binding and finishing the table topper!

Sharing at Oh Scrap!

Try a Technique {June IBA Project + Giveaway}

This month's theme for our Island Batik Ambassador assignment is trying a new technique!

This is a theme that we've had before for our Ambassador challenges -- last year, I played around with using bias tape to make a table runner.

This year, I'm going to try a technique that's been on my to do list for a VERY long time -- making Dresden plates! My plan is to make a Dresden plate mini quilt. As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics, Aurifil thread, and Hobbs batting to use and share with you!

I do not have a Dresden plate-specific ruler, but I do have a variety of other wedge rulers that can also be used to make the necessary wedges for Dresden plates.

There are a lot of different Dresden plate tutorials out there -- some using specific rulers, some not. The basic thing about Dresden plates is that the larger the angle of the wedge, the fewer wedges are required to make a full plate. The ruler I'm going to use has a 30 degree angle, so each block will have 12 wedges.

For my fabrics, I'm going to use some red, white, and blue Island Batik Scraps.

Since I haven't done an Island Batik giveaway in a while, let's do one today!

This time around, I'm sharing a bunch of the fabrics left over from my Plus Sign Sampler that I made last month. There are a lot of yellow, orange, and red scraps.

Comments for entries, you know the drill. If for some reason, you have issues with leaving a comment, send me an email (littlebunnyquilts@gmail.com) and I'll comment on your behalf. (PS. If you have issues commenting on my blog and other blogs, it is usually a result of your cookie and security settings.)

Leave me a comment telling me about what new techniques you've tried lately or what new techniques you want to try soon!

Giveaway is now closed and the winner is Nancy!

Twirls and Stripes {Finished Quilt}

It's time to show off my finished vintage inspired quilt and compare it to its inspiration!

My finished quilt:

The original quilt:

After finishing the quilt, I decided to see if I had any Hobbs batting in my Island Batik Ambassador box that would be the right size for my 40 x 48 baby quilt -- and I was in luck! As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics and Hobbs batting to use and share with you!

In my box, I had a crib size (45" x 60") cotton batting that fit the bill perfectly. I also got flannel for the backing, which I did have to piece but better pieced than too small, right?

For the quilting, I just did a simple bubbly meander in white thread, starting in the middle of the quilt and working out. I trimmed the batting and backing 1/2" beyond the edge of the quilt to prep it for binding.

I don't always manage to get a good photo that shows off the quilting as well as this one does! All of the straight lines in the quilt begged for some curvilicious quilting.

I cut yellow strips from a dotty batik print for my binding and decided that I wanted to sew the binding by hand to the back. And what luck! I had some perfectly colored yellow thread too!

This baby quilt hasn't been earmarked for anyone yet, but I doubt it will be waiting long for a little miss or little mister! This one seems to be a perfect gender-neutral quilt.

I'm also sure that I will make more baby quilts using this two-block quilt design! It's always good to have something quick and easy like this in the arsenal for baby quilts.

Quilt Stats:
Name: Twirls and Stripes
Pattern: self-designed, based on a vintage quilt
Size: 40" x 48"
Fabrics: Island Batik basics and blenders, flannel backing
Quilting: bubble meander in white thread
Started: February 2019
Finished: March 2019

Sharing at Wednesday Wait Loss, Needle and Thread Thursday, Brag about your Beauties, and What I Made Monday! Oh and this is also my Favorite March Finish!

Twirls and Stripes {Vintage Reimagined with Island Batik}

My life has been filled with a lot of strip piecing recently! Both with Unit A for the Daisy Chain QAL, and with this project!

After cutting the pieces and parts for this project, zipping together my "striped fabric" strip sets was the next step.

The HSTs went together quickly as well. I'm using two different orange fabrics and one yellow fabric for these units.

Subcutting the strip sets into blocks went slightly faster than trimming all of my HSTs, as you might have imagined.

Chain piecing all of the pinwheels was also a quick process -- here are the piles of blocks stacked together before I laid out my blocks.

Because I was able to squeeze five 8.5" squares out of each strip set (Island Batik fabrics are *actually* more than 42" wide selvage to selvage!) I do have enough blocks to do a 5x6 block arrangement for a 40" x 48" quilt and only one extra yellow pinwheel!

Here's the quilt blocks sewn into rows. Whenever possible, I like to use the "webbing" technique to put together my quilt tops. I realize now it might be worthwhile to do my own webbing tutorial, so keep your eyes out for one in the coming weeks/months. But for the time being, check out a tutorial from Bonnie Hunter.

Five seams later and I have a finished quilt top!

Now to find some backing fabric for this quilt. I'm leaning towards flannel since I will likely give it as a baby quilt but now that I don't live 5 minutes away from Joann's, I'll have to make a special trip this weekend. And after the super-shrinkage snafu that happened with the last bunch of flannel that I bought, I'm going to get an extra 1/4 yard just to be safe!

As an Island Batik Ambassador, I am provided with samples of various lines of Island Batik fabrics to use and share with you!

Dashing To The Chapel {In The Pipeline}

January is one of our two Island Batik blog hop months! I'm working with the Bazaar line this time around, which is a gorgeous collection of brights. Some of the fabrics have floral motifs, some have butterflies and dragonflies, and some are blender prints.

I decided that I wanted to use these fabrics to make a remixed version of our Dashing to the Chapel pattern. My mom and I constructed the original quilt in 2014 as a wedding gift for my sister and her husband. Her now-mother-in-law did the long arm quilting!

The original quilt used a fat quarter bundle plus coordinates, but I am working from half yards of a fewer number of prints. Additionally, I decided to simplify things for myself slightly by not making the blocks entirely random. I picked out ten colors for the larger size churn dash blocks:

I picked out the majority of the larger prints for the larger blocks and did a lot of cutting:

Not making one block at a time allowed for a major time savings in the form of marathon strip piecing:

Followed by marathon chain piecing of the HSTs to go with them.

This process was also repeated with six fabrics for my smaller 6" churn dashes and itty bitty 4.5" churn dashes. Here's a sneak peak of the top:

My official hop day is next Tuesday -- January 22nd. Until then you can get the Dashing to the Chapel pattern on Etsy and PayHip!

Don't forget to check out all of the stops for this week of the hop:

Monday, January 14 - Fortune Teller

Sarah @ Sarah Goer Quilts

Sherry @ Powered by Quilting

Jennifer @ The Inquiring Quilter

Tuesday, January 15  - Gypsy Rose

Jen @ Dizzy Quilter

Janet @ Whispers of Yore

Wednesday, January 16 - Paisley Park

Dione @ Clever Chameleon

Nancy @ Masterpiece Quilting

Thursday, January 17 - Soul Song

Carole @ Carol Lyles Shaw

Toby @ Gateway Quilts & Stuff  

Friday, January 18 - Twilight Chic

Jackie @ If These Threads Could Talk

Tina @ Quilting Affection

(And a quick teaser: I changed up the border a bit for this version and I can't wait to show it off!)

Sharing at Linky Tuesday!

Good Fortune {Clue #4}

After finishing Clue #3 of Good Fortune the night before Clue #4 came out, I was so excited to see that this clue was so quick and easy! Click here for all of the Good Fortune mystery information!

For Clue #4, we were instructed to make scrappy strip pieced rectangles. I was so thrilled with this because I was able to use up a ton of small scraps and I was able to finish the entire clue before I went out and did my grocery shopping on Saturday morning!

To start, I separated my aqua (instead of orange!) scraps into three piles -- bits, strips, and chunks. I also sorted out anything that was too small for this section of units.
-- "Bits" were anything at least 1.5" wide and up to about 6" square
-- "Strips" were strips at least 1" wide and up to 20" long
-- "Chunks" were anything WOF long or wider than 6"

I sorted my scraps this way so that I could focus on using the smallest pieces first. Some of these pieces have been in my stash a very long time -- and some fabrics were used in my On Ringo Lake too!

I did not use paper foundations for my units -- I also used a lot smaller scraps than Bonnie instructs -- so my units are actually all different, rather than having sets of matching strippy rectangles. Most of my units have 4 different fabrics, but a few have 5 or 6.

There are a lot of scraps in these pieces that came from my Wallflowers row quilt but a lot of it ended up being random things that have been hanging around my stash for a long time. I really like how many of the units ended up with red accents!

These also made a very nice dent in my scrap piles! The majority of my bits and strips piles were obliterated (literally!) to make these units and I only had to dip into my chunks pile a little bit for fabric variety at the end. Depending on the rest of the units for this quilt, I might not have enough aqua, or rather, enough variety of aqua, so another dig through my stash to pull some additional fabrics might be in order.

Here's a few units from Clue #3 and Clue #4 hanging out together:

I will admit that I'm a little confuzzled by our two different sizes of HSTs (for now) so I'm not going to strain my brain in trying to solve the mystery just yet.

Here's a collage of my four finished clues:

This is likely the point where I will fall utterly and completely behind! Between leaving for the holidays and closing on our house (!!!) the next few weeks are going to be very busy!

Sharing at Bonnie's Mystery Monday Link-up and Linky Tuesday!

Baseball Baby Quilts {Tops for Twins}

After what was a momentary lull, I am back to having three baby quilts on my to-do list. The first two are the twin baseball-themed quilts using these fabrics:

I decided to use our new Boot Scootin' Baby pattern for these quilts. This is my first time using this pattern.

I also decided that I didn't need to be fancy with these quilts -- the two tops will be exactly the same.

The number one complaint (if you can even call it a complaint) that we seemed to get about the Ready, Set, Soar pattern is that it doesn't use 2.5" strips. Boot Scootin' Baby does use 2.5" strips so it does have that perk.

I did a lot of chain piecing over the weekend! I was about halfway done with the strip piecing when I snapped this picture.

A reminder -- when you're sewing strip sets, remember to sew with the same fabrics on top or bottom to reduce stretch and wonk! I always sewed with either the yellow or blue print on top and the white or red print on the bottom. My strip set ended up very straight and my selvages lined up well too!

I have both of the strip bases done but I only had time to slice and insert the applique background for one of the two quilts. The quilt is a little long because I used a full width of fabric for my strips instead of trimmed down strips. I'll trim the bottom before I do the quilting so that both quilts are the exact same size.

Now I have to decide what I'll use for the applique section. Part of me wants to move forward and simply add the applique sections and get these finished, but there's also part of me that wants to wait and add the names of the boys once they are born. But that delays quilting, binding, and mailing so I'm going back and forth on what to do.

Happy Monday! Sharing at Linky Tuesday!

The Border Quilt QAL {Checkerboard Rings}

I've managed to add on a few more rounds of rounds to my Border Quilt! Check out all about the quilt along on the Patterns by Jen blog!

For this section of the quilt, we added alternating checkerboard borders and background borders. You can see my first post about the quilt center here.

For my first checkerboard border, I decided to go with red and light green. The red dot is a fabric that I used for the binding of one of my Little Firecracker quilts and the green is left over from my Little Bunny Placemats and I also used it in my Magnolia mystery quilt.

For my second checkerboard, I went with my paisley print and dark green. Both of these fabrics are ones that have just been hanging around in my stash for a while.

The next round will be sawtooth stars! I'm hoping I have enough fabric to at least get through adding all of the sawtooth stars and then a final background border.

Check out some of the other versions of the quilt by some great bloggers!
Stephanie @ Quilt'n'Party
Daphne Greig
Becca @ Pretty Piney
Kate @ Seams Like A Dream
Vicki @ My Creative Corner

Jungle Cruise Quilt {Great Outdoors Blog Hop with Island Batik}

Today is finally my day to share as part of the Great Outdoors Blog Hop!

Let's go on an adventure -- let's go on a Jungle Cruise! This line is inspired by the wild side of nature -- featuring snakeskin prints, giraffe spots, leopard speckles, and leaves!

When I was thinking about what pattern to use with these fabrics, I thought that our new Summer Patio pattern was the perfect choice to showcase these beautiful fabrics in a fun and easy setting. I posted about the start of this quilt in July!

I had enough fabrics to make the full sized quilt and put my strip pieced blocks in diagonals across the quilt.

For the quilting, I used 50 wt. Aurifil thread in "blonde beige" and did all over swirls for the quilting. This color blended well with all of the prints in the collection.

For the binding I did a semi-scrappy binding using alternating strips of two different bright prints. I fully found this by machine. I used a variegated thread from Superior Threads to do the top stitching on the binding.

This quilt finishes at 77 x 91 inches for the full size. The pattern also includes instructions for a twin size that finishes at 63 x 91 inches.

I loved working with the Jungle Cruise line and hope that you have checked out all of the blog posts for the Great Outdoors hop! Click here for the full schedule -- I've updated all of the links to date with links to the posts rather than to just the blog homepage. That post also includes the live Rafflecopter for the Grand Prize giveaway sponsored by Island Batik -- they'll be giving away strip packs of new fabric to three lucky winners!

I'm always happy to share my Island Batik fabric wealth with my friends from the interwebs (that's you!) and so I am giving away TWO mini-strip sets (24 strips each) cut from the remaining yardage of my bundle of Jungle Cruise fabrics.

You know the drill -- comments for entries, up to three entries per person! (If you leave more than three comments, extra comments will be deleted and not counted as entries.) Giveaway will be closed on September 5th (but I have another one planned that will start on September 7th!)

1. Tell me which of the new IB collections is your favorite -- check out the Spring collections here and the Summer collections here!

2. If you already visited some of the previous posts of the Great Outdoors Blog Hop (this post has the full schedule of the hop!), leave a second comment telling me what other posts you enjoyed from my fellow IB Ambassadors.

3. If you follow Little Bunny Quilts in some form or fashion, tell me how you follow! (Facebook, Instagram, Bloglovin, or any other blog reader.)

The giveaway is now closed! Our winners are Margaret and Cecelia!

Thank you for visiting me today on the hop! Please check out all of the other stops on the hop and get the pattern to make your own Summer Patio quilt!

Sharing at Linky Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday!