Sewing Olympics: GOLD!

Even before the closing ceremonies of the real Olympics started I had finished my flannel string quilt top!  I had doubted that I could do it, but it was a lot of fun meeting my goal.

First, THANKS! for all the votes — B & C were definitely the popular options. I ultimately decided I didn’t want to buy any fabric for making this quilt and thus C won out!  Finished quilt measures 48×60.  Perfect snuggle on the couch size.

Oh, wait, you want a better picture of the quilt??  The my-gosh-it’s-windy-today action shot doesn’t quite do it for you?  Ahhh, here you go!

That’s the Official Olympic Do-Not-Fly-Away Feet-on-the-Quilt Stance.

It was quite a windy day (hopefully it’ll be this windy next weekend for the Zilker Kite Festival!), so it is hard to tell exactly, but this quilt did give me some problems. I took out all the paper foundations before I sewed the blocks together (which, OMGosh, took HOURS – luckily, the Olympics were on to pass the time, imagine that!) and think that might have been a mistake. I think all those stretchy bias edges wreaked havoc, and there’s at least a 0.75″ difference in the measurements from top to bottom.

Guess I’ll be working on stretching it uniformly when I baste it. Yikes! But I went ahead and stay-stitched the ends to hopefully prevent it from falling apart and/or getting any larger before I baste it!

Anyone else reading make a string quilt?  When did you take out the foundations??

Loving this!  Man, I love color.  But wait! What’s that behind the string quilt?  Was there more completed during the Sewing Olympics???

YES!

First, the leftovers from this quilt were used to make a doll quilt.  My children LOVE playing “go to bed” lately.  Really.  Wish they were half as good at really going to bed as they are at playing going to bed.  But anyway, this baby-sized woogie will get lots of use by the girls:

Elena suggested though that we give it to her brand new cousin since it’s the perfect size for a little baby.  This little quilt measures @ 18×24.

AND, while I was busy looking through fabric for potential borders and backings for the above flannel string quilt, I ran across yet another baggy filled with flannel scraps! And thus, another quilt was quickly born while I was waiting for the setting votes to be tallied and my decision to be made:

This quilt is definitely going to be for a baby boy some day. It measures 40×48, and I also already sewed together a flannel back for it! Yay!  (The backing doesn’t match exactly, but close enough to work IMHO.)  It is just awesome, if I do say so myself, and really only took one night of cutting and one night of sewing.

SO, I think I might actually deserve a gold, silver and bronze for all this work!  Thanks again to the insatiable need blog for hosting these Sewing Olympics and getting me to start and finish 3 separate quilt tops!  (We’ll just worry about the actual quilting of these tops later.)