How I spent the month of December ...

These are the quilts I made for my girls for Christmas. I loved the quilts they had, more floral and watercolor looking blues on a white background, but felt it was time for a change ... something upbeat, vibrant, fun, colorful, yet not little-girlish as they are both growing up ... and I think this worked out the way I wanted it to.

The quilts are sewn from 5" squares from 15 or so different batiks and solid cottons. The backside is white flannel. I hoped the white flannel would lighten up the quilts and keep them from appearing too busy ... I was a little worried that these would look like some sort of very colorful explosion, and not in a pretty way.

These are rag quilts, creating by putting the front and back pieces together and sewing them WRONG sides together to the next pieces. That took some getting used to! Once all the seams are sewn the seam allowance is cut every 1/4" to enable the fabric to fray nicely when it's washed.

I had a lot of fun with this, but really wasn't sure how it'd turn out until they were actually on the bed ... seeing all the raw edges sticking out was not encouraging.

These quilts took almost a month to make, but mostly because I had to do it when the kids weren't around ... even at night I was afraid they'd wake up and see what I was doing. Apparently, I did a good job hiding the project, C. said she couldn't believe I'd done both quilts without her having any idea what I was up to. The most time consuming part was definately cutting the seam allowances every 1/4". That was a lot of cutting!

This was the project that did in the old sewing machine and required a new machine. I managed to cut the fabric when doing the edges and had to darn it so a new sewing machine was just absolutely necessary, of course. I'm very grateful that this is a busy pattern ... I don't think I could find the part that got cut without looking for a very long time.

The girls like them, M. said it was her favorite gift. She also said she was going to make me a quilt, isn't that sweet?