I've missed showing you a lot of new fabric in my stash in the past few months, but here's some old stash fabric. In 2005 I participated in a purple charm fabric swap that resulted in The Purple Quilt that I finally finished last year. I have a TON of purple charm squares left, so when I was offered an opportunity to be part of a project-based blog hop, I added one more thing to the to do list and said yes!
Now, since I already used my favorite fabrics on The Purple Quilt, I'm a little less than enthusiastic about the pile that I have left in my stash. So, step one was to sort through the pile and eliminate the ugly fabrics and the really ugly fabrics (no pictures of those). ;-) I ended up easily finding 48 purple charms in my stash and I'll only be buying some solid purple (dark indigo by American Made Brand, the middle one below) as my "neutral" to be able to get started on the blocks.
feature fabricsauditioning solids for my background fabric
This makes the fourth project that I cut fabric to start during the first week of January. At least amidst all that cutting I even also had my first finish of 2015 yesterday (my Disney Mini for the IG #DisneyMiniSwap2015 that I'll be mailing in the next day or so -- pics to follow).
I'm excited to keep working on this purple project and for the blog hop reveal in March.
I only checked 5 of my 17 (ouch!) goals off my 2014 Q4 Finish Along goal list. I'm still quite pleased as two of those were 8 and 11 years old and one was a twin sized, the largest I've free motion quilted on my domestic machine (with a 7" throat).
So, rolling those forward, reassessing on a few, adding some additional old WIPs, I think this is the whole list... maybe.
Winnie the Pooh Skirt/Shorts for The Girl (fabric selected)
Envelope quilt (a couple blocks pieced)
Monster Quilt (first applique block in progress)
Christmas Mini Quilt (using 4 orphan blocks I somehow acquired)
So, I tried to order these in priority order. Somewhere around #9 this got really hard. My guild is having a UFO swap this month, so maybe I can drop one of these off my list. We'll see.
Here's a glimpse of the last thing to come off of my sewing machine, the first block for my Rainbow Mini Swap (#rainbowminiswap on IG). Linking up to Q1 Finish Along Goals.
My son is in his second year in a Montessori preschool and this year he's really enjoyed the hand sewing projects in class. He started on a plastic canvas sewing project, spiraling in from the outside border. Then one of the teachers drew him a rat to stitch on burlap. And now he's working on sewing a teddy bear which I suspect is intended to become a pillow (no picture -- think two teddy bear shaped cutouts of woven fabric, sewing them together with regular needle and thread around the edge).
school sewing project -- progress pic
Seeing how excited he's been about sewing I invited him to help me machine piece some seams on the drawstring bag I was making for my mother-in-law. He really enjoyed that. I asked him if he'd like to learn how to make a quilt and he was THRILLED!
Step One: He raided my stash of fabric and selected a variety of animal prints.
He's even decided on a friend who he intends to give it to. (Yes, it's kind of killing me that I don't get to keep his first quilt!) But I appreciate how excited he is to give this gift. We'll see how he's feeling once it's done.
In the interest of keeping it simple, we'll be using 6" finished squares. I'll be making a small quilt alongside him so that I can show him the process with my blocks in an effort to let him do as much of his own sewing as possible.
Step Two was to cut out all the squares. I did that myself, cause I'm just not so excited about handing a rotary cutter to a 4-year-old. :-) He hung out with me while I cut out the squares as I was not granted permission to do that step without him. That also meant that my 2 1/2-year-old daughter hung out with us. She enjoyed being "in charge" of the scraps of leftover fabric.
Step Three: He meticulously laid out his 36 blocks in his own pattern. Not knowing in advance that there was going to be a pattern requiring multiples of 3 of the same print we had to pitch a few blocks and managed to find one more suitable fabric that I could get three squares out of. It happened to be my leftover fabric from making my daughter's pants. She was concerned that I was cutting up her pants. She kept telling me that she didn't want me to cut them, she wanted to wear them. Here's his final layout.
Fabric and layout selected by my 4-year-old son.
Now, since her brother got to "make a pattern" with his quilt squares, she naturally decided that she should get to make a pattern as well. So I let her choose the layout for my 35 blocks (I didn't manage to end up with 36 due to a flaw in one of my fabrics). She and I have a different idea of what "pattern" is, but I've decided to go with it. No idea what I'll be doing with this quilt. She won't be doing the sewing, so I think her contribution to our project ends here.
Layout by my 2 1/2-year-old daughter.
Have you taught a young child to quilt? Any tips?
See how our project is going in Part 2 of this series.
Linking up to 
