Catching Up The Week

I having been stitching away, this week, on the samples for Penguin and Fish.  I am half way through number 7 (a super cute giraffe) and then I will just have the monkey left. I hope to get them in the mail by Monday.  The designs are simple, but with the sweetest details that really make them sing!  I am having a lot of fun working on them, albeit with a bit of pressure to do my very best work.  (I will admit to taking stitches out to re-do them when I might have said "good enough" if I were stitching for my own project!)

This is the cutest little hedgie!

Before I received the sample materials, I did finish up two more quilts for donation to the birthday program. 

The nursery pastel scrappy trip-a-long:

The snow is all gone, after today's rain!

I am using up some puffy poly batting that I got at an estate sale some months back. It is quite different from low loft cotton batting.  A little challenging, but it does show off the quilting really well!   I did an orange peel design since I had a built-in grid in the squares. (You have to look closely to see that I changed direction a time or two.  The high loft camouflages errors nicely!)   I used the same stripe as the binding for the backing and it ended up about 36" x 48".

This is number two, this week.

When Ms A was little she had some tiny Kitty Cucumber paper dolls. They were so small they fit into a little matchbox!   

I came across these coordinating KC fabrics at a Goodwill last summer. I outlined the blocks with quilting and stitched around the motifs in the focus blocks and around the smaller kitties in the alternating block, along with some "bubbles" around the tossed flowers.    I did not use a different bobbin thread to coordinate with the dark blue backing. I don't mind that the quilting shows, but I wish the binding stitches were tidier.  Having a binding that is an equal width on both the front and the back is still an area of opportunity for improvement for me.  

This one ended up about 40" square.

I hope wherever these little quilts end up, they will keep a little one cozy!