Second Saturday Charity Quilting

It's that time of month, the second Saturday, what I commonly refer to as my 'quilt until you drop' day. Quilts from Cornerstone, a charity quilting group, met today. Our scheduled hours are 10 to 5 and today, instead of 'dropping', I was still going strong at 5 p.m. I kept working and they were folding up tables and putting things away around me.

Our fearless leader, Jeanine, had an assortment of 'extras' for us to work on today. I woke up this morning and decided to take an unfinished project to work on.

A Neglected Quilt Project

In May 2005, we had a "use up scraps" day where the goal was to use up strips left from various projects. The method was string-pieced squares or whatever we wanted to do. I opted for whatever. I grabbed a bunch of strips, got black background fabric from Jeanine and cut strips of that and started sewing. Sewed for 5 or 6 hours and had a bunch of little heart blocks. I started cutting solid black squares to go with them, but didn't get too far with sewing pairs of 1 heart and one black square. I took stuff home to work on, but basically did nothing but move the blocks and fabric once in a while when they were in the way. For 16 months. My bad.

It took me a couple of hours today to lay the hearts out on the ping pong table at the church where the group meets. That included cutting the rest of the black squares and the triangles to set the heart blocks with. The photo above shows everything finally laid out ready to sew together.

I sewed diligently most of the afternoon, working past our 5 p.m. stop time to get enough sewing done that I could easily transport the pieces without fear of jumbling my layout. The picture on the left is how the top now looks, at home on my design wall. Yes, one row is upside down. I will fix that.

Booty! I Got Booty!

Despite returning the finished flying geese top, book and ruler that I brought home last month, I came home with more stuff than I left with. Jessie was cleaning out some stuff and I wound up with most of what Jeanine didn't want. Not in this picture is a skein of yarn my friend Jodie brought me. I'll probably make a hat from that.

The fiberfill and prequilted fabric is all from Jessie. There is one baby panel in the fabric and the rest is all-over prints which will make good blanket backs for Project Linus.

The batting scrap on top of the fabric is a remnant from today's quilting (something someone else worked on); they've learned I'll take any batting scrap, no matter how small. I have dreams of making some stuffed items for charity. If the fiberfill and batting scraps start taking over, I give part of them to my stepsister who does more than dream about stuffing things.

Project Linus Booty, aka Blankets

Jeanine gave me these 4 blankets for Project Linus. The quilts are a simple one-patch strip pieced with 2 different fabrics. The upper left quilt alternates chenille and flannel patches. The upper right quilt alternates solid fleece and a print flannel patches. The 2 knit afghans are made in a checkerboard design, alternating squares of knit and purl. The afghan on the lower right was knit in one piece. The afghan on the lower left is knit checkerboard blocks that are crocheted together and a crocheted edging added.