Summer Clean-Out Island Batik Giveaway!

Update: the giveaway is now closed and the winners are noted below!

It's been a little while since I had an Island Batik giveaway and now is the perfect time! We'll be getting our next Ambassador goodie boxes in July or early August, and I've already set aside the fabrics I'll be using for those projects so I have plenty of fabrics to share!

I sorted through my Island Batik bins (I keep my Island Batik fabrics separated out from everything else!) and found a whole pile of fabrics to share.

I think this is enough fabrics for more than one giveaway given the size of envelopes that I have! I will stuff these envelopes full of fabric, and send them off to (at least!) two winners. This giveaway will close on Monday, July 2nd.

To enter:

1. For everyone: Tell me your favorite scrap busting project! Is it potholders? Crumb quilts? Paper piecing?

2. For followers: There's lots of ways you can follow, just tell me how you keep up with Little Bunny Quilts. (Facebook, Bloglovin', Instagram, etc.)

NOTE: Bloglovin' readers -- you must comment on the actual blog post to be entered -- comments on the Bloglovin feed do not count as giveaway 

Our winners are:

As a bit of a preview, our July theme is secondary designs, so I'll be working on a two block quilt baby quilt. August is our blog hop month showing off the new fabrics that will be shipping to shops throughout the fall and I'll be working with the Jungle Cruise collection. I'll be using it in our Summer Patio pattern!

Have a happy Wednesday! Don't forget to check out our $3 and $5 pattern sale on Etsy!

Double Delight {Completed Quilt Top}

Since I had not one, but two Saturdays last week because I took Friday off work, I was able to get two quilt tops done! One is an upcoming project for Moda Bake Shop that I've been sharing sneak peaks of on Instagram.

But I also finished my Double Delight quilt top! (Pattern from Bonnie Hunter's free pattern tab!) I spent a long time trying to figure out what color to use as the setting triangles. I thought I had a few options in my stash, but I wasn't thrilled with any of them. One navy was too large a print, one burgundy was too red, one burgundy was too purple!

In perusing the Fat Quarter Shop birthday week sales, I found a great chartreuse and cream print that is actually from the North Woods line by Kate Spain. Even though it's *technically* a Christmas print, it is the perfect color for this quilt!

This photo was taken about 2/3rds of the way through sewing the rows together. Working on quilts that are on point always ends up with a big bulk of quilt to wrangle! Even with straight set quilts of the same size, the on point quilts always seem to be more difficult to wrangle.

I think the green setting triangles really makes the rolling star blocks shine in the quilt! All of the different pinks blend together so well -- I was worried that the brighter pinks that I had to use towards the end of the process of making nine-patches would be too bright! I am not exaggerating when I say that I used ALL of my pink scraps!

Now I'll need to decide if this quilt needs any borders. The quilt as is is approximately 64 by 76 so right now it would make a perfect throw, but with a little bit of border it would be a twin. Decisions, decisions!

I hope you had a wonderful weekend! Thank you everyone for the kind words about my 30 Pearls quilt and the lovely birthday wishes!

Sharing with Oh Scrap, Linky Tuesday Let's Bee Social, and Needle and Thread Thursday.

PS. Don't forget to check out my Island Batik giveaway! I cleaned out my IB bins and pulled a gallon sized bag worth of scraps to pass along to some winners!

30 Pearls {Finished Quilt}

Happy birthday to me and hip hip hooray for another finish!

My modern-themed quilt for our June Island Batik Ambassador challenge is finished! You can see the first two posts on this quilt here and here.

I finished the binding and trimmed all of the lose threads last night and am going to hang it up in my sewing room later today!

As I explained in my original post, there are 30 "pearls" to celebrate my 30th birthday (today!), pearls are my birthstone, and pearl is a traditional 30th anniversary gift.

I quilted free motion pebbles in each pearl with white Aurifil. In the backgrounds I used five different shades -- hot pink, red, dark coral, orange, and purple -- to quilt the different filler motifs. I used 56 different filler motifs inspired by Leah Day's quilting gallery! It required quite a bit of starting and stopping, which I don't normally like to do when I quilt, but it was 100% worthwhile for this quilt to be exactly as I had envisioned.

The binding and hanging pocket are of a cream Island Batik print that is slightly darker than my pearls. I had originally pulled a purple fabric for the binding but I didn't have quite enough fabric for that. In the below picture, you can really make out some of the quilting with the orange thread!

For the whole quilt, I used white thread in the bobbin so that I didn't have to change both the top thread and the bobbin every time I needed to switch between colors (which was a lot!). The texture on the backing is just so fun! I managed to keep my pieced backing nearly perfectly square with the top, which is a miracle for me!

I will try to post some close up pictures of some of my favorite quilted sections on Instagram over the weekend. Using Leah Day's gallery as my inspiration was a great starting point however I had to think through how to quilt some of the designs in the arcs! Some were easier than others to "bend" into the arched spaces -- like the meandering type motifs and feather type motifs -- than others! There were a few that I decided would only work in the full squares rather than in the arches, which worked out well.

This project is a rarity in that I both designed and made it for me for fun. I enjoy and love just about all of the quilting that I do but I don't often make something "just for me" and it was a nice change of pace to be completely selfish with this project and be finicky about every detail without worrying about writing a pattern to go along with it.

As always, a big yippee hooray thank you to Island Batik for providing these fabrics for me each month to play with and to stretch my creativity! I love our modern challenge month as Amabassadors and this might be my favorite Ambassador project of all of the things I have made in the last 18 months!

Quilt Stats:
Name: 30 Pearls
Design: self designed, essentially randomly spaced drunkard's path blocks
Fabrics: Sunflower Serenade from Island Batik
Size: 42 inches square
Quilting: pearls: pebbles in white Aurifil;
     background: 56 different motifs inspired by Leah Day in pink, purple, red, orange, and dark coral Aurifil
Started: April 2018
Finished: June 2018

Have a wonderful weekend!

Drift Away {In Scraps}

It's hard to deny -- I love scrap quilts! Over the last few years, I've made quite a few quilts that were made entirely (or nearly entirely) from fabric from my stash (like Pinwheel Plus, Sunset Gathering, Summer Solstice, Meadow, and my two Blue in Bloom quilts, to name a few!)

I'm now in a place where my fabric yardage and bundles are dwindling, and I have scads and scads of fabric that fall into the scraps-to-large-scraps category. Now that my Top Spin and On Ringo Lake quilts are finished, and my Double Delight and Donuts projects are ready to be put together into finished tops (with the help of a trip to the store!), it's time to embark on a new scrappy project.

Somewhat by serendipity, Melissa of Happy Quilting released her Drift Away pattern and I knew it was perfect for my green, teal, and blue fabrics that didn't get used in my Donuts quilt. Rather than use fat quarters, I used a variety of sizes of scraps, many of which were leftover chunks from backings, to cut the squares needed for this project. I also decided on using black for the background since I had a large chunk of it on hand.

In this picture, the smallest size squares are already sewn into pairs, but I can still pick out lots of recognizable fabrics from older projects! The plaid on the left was the backing for Racing Rails, the teal dot was the backing for Sunset Gathering, the olive and aqua leaf is from my Midnight mystery quilt, and the squiggle is from Beau's Ties.

One of the reasons I decided to go with black instead of a light solid is because the fabrics I used have both whites and off-whites in the prints.

I managed to get a significant part of the first corner together rather quickly! I didn't lay out the entire quilt at once so I just started randomly pulling the medium and large sized focus squares from their piles. I have two different fabrics for the large setting triangles, so I am alternating them.

So far I think my "place-the-squares-as-you-go" plan is going quite well. I only had to take out one or two seams where I sewed units upside down. Only a few rows to go until I'm halfway done with the quilt top! This quilt as designed ends up at 80" square -- I'm strongly considering adding a border on all four sides so that it would end up full/queen sized since I may give this as a gift. But those are things to decide another day!

Sharing at Needle and Thread Thursday!

Blocked Rainbow Quilt {Prize Winners}

It's time to share the prizes for the Blocked Rainbow QAL! Thank you again to our sponsors and to the participants!

Annette: Benartex Contempo Fabric Bundle

Susan: HBD Pattern Bundle

Gina: Quilting JetGirl Pattern Bundle

Ramona: Island Batik Bundle

Liz's top: HBD Pattern Bundle

A huge thank you to our grand prize sponsors!

Honey, Bunny, and Doll Designs
Quilting JetGirl (pattern bundle)
Benartex Fabrics (fabric bundle)
Island Batik Fabrics (fabric bundle)