Busman's Holiday

What do quilters do when they have a few days off? Quilt of course! Last week I quilted three charity quilts for Oso. One of them was my twin Orca quilt, made from the leftovers of a fussy-cut orca print. It's a simple design from 5" squares and 5 x 10" strips, staggered to give it some motion.

Quilting is a simple wavy design:

Diamond box blocks are coming along, and I've found a shortcut for the bias seams - creasing the strip where it crosses, rather than marking each line with chalk. It took almost 2 hours of pinning the pieces together while watching TV, and that allowed a bit more production line sewing. Six blocks are completely finished, and the centers on the remaining 14 sewn and ready for the final round.

 

The background fabric is a grey/taupe/light blue fabric that a friend gave me. It had been made into a dress, but as it is a batik it didn't have very nice drape, and was never finished.

Pinwheel 9-patch center is finished, and a nice rich purple border finally appeared from my stash, not yet cut and attached.

A large bag of plaid fabrics was gifted to me by my sister, including two large pieces of a bright Madras plaid patchwork destined for a shirt, and at least two lap backings from other pieces.

The Tennessee Lightening quilt new to my queue is a simple 9-patch block consisting of half-square triangles with good contrast. My goal is to make a twin-sized charity quilt from some of my reproduction fabrics, with a brown background and blues, reds and purples as the dark colors.