The Quilts I Gave for Christmas 2013

Three of the grandchildren received quilts for Christmas this year. Aberdeen's is a wall hanging for her room. I've shown it on this blog before; I'm so pleased with it. I made it all from Liberty tana lawn scraps and hand quilted around each little dress.

Joe made a hanging bar for it.

I believe you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

Nate's quilt was made by putting together most of a big pile of swap blocks from ancient times. Dear Susan ran a swap of primitive-type applique on black and at one point each block had to contain a heart, a star, or a bird (I think). I was enchanted with this swap and apparently had lots of time on my hands because I swapped literally dozens of blocks.

I thought they would make up into a nice quilt for a big-boy bed, and that they would be interesting for someone who is three-going-on-four -- could play "I Spy," looking for the kitty, the cow, something to do with Christmas, etc.

And then there is Eli's big boy bed quilt, my favorite gift that I gave this year. This quilt gave me fits when I started. First of all, the pattern I started with was for a crib and contained twelve blocks. I knew I was going to hand buttonhole all of the pieces, so I went down to nine blocks. And then enlarged them. A huge problem was that when I didn't prewash the fabrics, the bonding didn't take, and the pieces were destroyed. So off I went to buy additional fabric, prewash, and recut. The hand-buttonholing was done in front of Netflix, and I used the same blue thread as the background of the border. I'd chosen all of the fabrics from the border colors.

When I was putting it together, Joe said it needed a STOP sign, so I made a snowball and he drew the letters on for me to embroider. I had a lot of fun designing all of the filler blocks. I laid it all out on graph paper and it all worked out according to plan.

When I took the quilt to the machinist, I was thrilled to discover that she had a transportation design where the shapes of the vehicles were practically identical to the shapes of the appliqued vehicles. I had thought she should quilt it in yellow or green, but she suggested the orange and I know from past experience that she is never wrong!

And here's Eli, pleased as punch with his new quilt. 

He does have hands, actually; he just can't keep them still!