Sarah's Dreams Rag Quilt

My friend Shannen recently lost her daughter Sarah to a form of brain cancer called DIPG. She and her husband founded Sarah's Dreams (sarahsdreams.org) to increase awareness and raise money for research for this disorder. I made my first rag quilt for their next fund-raising auction.

 

First, I designed the pattern - gray and purple are the colors of the organization and the gray ribbon is the symbol for brain cancer, so I decided to go with a gray ribbon and dark purple background on the front and light purple ribbon and gray background on the back. Next, I cut my flannel fabrics in 5 inch squares (final size 4 inch squares, given a 0.5 inch seam allowance). As the pattern was 15x15 the final size of the quilt would be 5 feet x 5 feet. I cut the low loft cotton batting into 3.5 inch squares. The next step is to make the quilt sandwiches:

Here are all of my quilt sandwiches:

 

 I laid out the quilt on my bedroom floor:

 

Then sewed it together, being particularly careful of the seams along the outline of the light purple ribbon on the back. I only had to re-do one or two of them to make everything line up perfectly!

 

Next, I clipped and clipped and clipped the seams until they all were raggedy. A few runs through the washer and dryer resulted in a perfectly raggedy quilt!

 



The last step was to add a quilt label.

I'm am hoping that it will help to raise a nice sum to help fund DIPG research. Miss you Sarah.

Svetlana's Quilt

 



A few years ago, my friend Svetlana admired a tied quilt made for me by my late grandmother. I decided recently to make Svetlana her own tied quilt. As she has pink curtains in her bedroom, I wanted to incorporate pink and gray fabrics in the quilt. I started with these fabrics:

 

 

In the end, though, I didn't like the apple green or the dark gray fabrics and substituted in the following fabrics:

 

 

I laid out my 5.5 inch squares in a 20x19 grid for a queen sized quilt.

This is the top half:

This is the bottom half:

 

Next, I sewed the squares together with a quarter inch seam allowance to finish the quilt top:

 

I brought it home to Wisconsin where my mom helped me to assemble and tie the quilt:

 

 

Next, my mom and I finished the quilt by hand-sewing the edges:

 

 

Finally, I added a label:

 

 

The final quilt:

 

My first tied quilt was a success - Svetlana loves it!



Flower Quilt Update

I've also made a little more progress on my Flower Quilt. With my new skills from my quilting class, I cut out all the little green squares I will need for the sashing. I've laid it out on my spare bed, but am still futzing with it. 

Star Quilt

After having my flower quilt applique squares turn out better than I hoped, I decided I should take a quilting class to give me the best chance of putting them together well. I signed up for Beginner's Quilting. It was a four session class. The first class was on January 22nd. We made our first square in class:

By the second class on February 5th we had to have all our star squares done. I made 55 total and ended up using 54 in my quilt. Before class I laid them out in a tentative pattern:

During class #2 we learned how to add sashing and setting points - this step went faster and by the 3rd class my quilt top looked like this:

During class #3 on Feb 26th we learned how to add borders:

During class #4 on March 5th we saw several demos on how to put the quilt together and actually quilt it. It's been a little while, but I've finally found time to put the layers of my quilt together this weekend. The next step will be to machine quilt it, but I think I need to take the Beginner's Machine Quilting class first.

Flower Quilt - Machine Applique

It took me a couple of weeks to have the guts to start machine appliquing my squares. But with a little bit of practice, I started doing the easiest parts of each square and slowly progressed. I could have done better in a few places, but overall I am quite pleased with how these squares turned out.