Fifty Cents worth of Fun and Frolics

As mentioned in my last post,  I bought a cute woodland panel for 50 cents at a recent Super Bowl Sale.  I thought it would make a great donation quilt for "Quilts for Kids".  The fabric was called "Forest Frolic" and consisted of six  9" square animal motifs, plus two banners with chickadees.

Now, I have lots of projects in the quilting queue, and yet somehow this one went straight to the top. In the back of my mind, I kept trying to figure out the best way to use this panel, and finally  I had to just get it started to see where it would take me.

The quick and easy thing to do  would have been to cut out five of the animal motifs and set them together in a big nine patch block.  But... that would have left me with one extra animal motif, and two of these cute little chickadee rows:

So, I decided to cut into the panel and see what else I could come up with. (Hey, for 50 cents I didn't have much to lose.)

I trimmed around each of the motifs, including the chickadees and set them out on my design board:

Then I cut 1 1/2" strips from each of 5 coordinating fabrics:

and began sewing borders around each of the motifs:

I played around a bit, and eventually,  ended up with this arrangement:

Now came the fun part.   How to piece this puzzle?   I measured each component and charted it out on graph paper.

The chart helped me to figure out what size the background pieces had to be, and how to organize the piecing into smaller subunits.  (I actually enjoy these types of calculations, so don't feel bad for me.)

I considered using a variety of different fabrics for the background pieces, but,  I would have had to subdivide them into even smaller pieces in order to avoid  having two of the same colored fabrics touch, and that was taking this challenge just a little too far.

Instead, I chose a basic beige fabric for the background to mimic the block centers, and started building up my puzzle:

I was able to construct the quilt top into 3 big pieces, and only had to do some partial piecing on one of the sections.  (I think my experience making my Long Time Gone quilt helped me out quite a bit.)

After sewing those last few seams, I added a narrow brown border to visually contain the squares, and  some fun asymmetrical borders with bright orange cornerstones to finish off the top.  Here is the big finish:

I'm happy with the outcome. I think it will make a cute quilt for either a boy or girl, and one thing is for sure...it is one-of-a-kind!

I still have plenty of the coordinating fabrics to put toward future quilts and now my brain can go work on something else.

Fabric Sale or Fabric Fail?

I bought this cute Woodland panel for 50 cents at a Super Bowl sale at my local quilt shop:

I thought it would make a cute Quilts for Kids donation quilt.  When I looked through my stash for some coordinates, it seemed that everything I had was just a little too bright, and made the panel look dull in comparison.

So, this weekend, I went to a local fabric blowout sale that advertised fabric at $4.00 a yard.  I picked out some fabrics to go with the panel, but with a 1 yard minimum purchase, I ended up spending $20.00 for five yards.

Now granted, that's a great price for fabric, and I will most definitely have some leftover to add back into the stash.  But, does it really make sense to spend $20 for fabric to go with a 50 cent panel?

Toby is still mulling this over.

Shawl wrapped up

I'm a little late, but here is the update on Prayer Shawls I made in 2017:

My first finish was this teal and white color combination that I had only just started back in 2016, but got it completed last year:

I also made two shawls from what has become my favorite pattern, the One Skein Wrap.  The first one was a combination of white with pink:

The second one was this magenta/cranberry colored one that I blogged about here.

This next one was made up of rows of fans.  I think I may have to dig out that pattern and make another one.

With Spring and Summer coming, I wanted to make a more lightweight lacy shawl, so I made this one:

With all the open areas in this pattern, it was not surprising that it only took two skeins instead of the usual three.

This next one was a bit more masculine. It's based on the granny square pattern, but done in rows. 

Long color variations in the yarn from white to purple made for an interesting finished look in this next one:

Not as many shawls in 2017 as there were in previous years.  I developed some wrist pain, so I had to cut back on how long I could crochet in one sitting, and also take some time off for it to rest. 

My Prayer Shawl group continues to be going strong.  In only four years we have created and given away over 1000 shawls!