I just got home from dropping these two quilts off at the Cunningham Children’s Home, for their 2025 Festival of Quilts! While planning a “Little Ghost” quilt for my daughter, I asked folks here for any light blue, white, or grey fabrics they might be willing to send me, to help me make it good and scrappy. Oh goodness, did LC members deliver! They sent me so much fabric, and I cut it all into 5" squares to use, but after making 3 quilt tops with it, I still had tons left. So I decided to use as much as I could to make donation quilts.
A Diamond in the Scraps
After doing 3 quilts that were just squares, I wanted to switch things up, so I made a ton of HST’s (Half Square Triangles), and created a diamond pattern with them. To make it more fun and dynamic, I set the central diamond off-center, and have the colors radiating outwards. The backing for this one is plain navy, and was pieced from the off-cuts of the two smaller Ghost Quilts . The binding was cut from a medium blue I had in stash. I normally go with rather sedate bindings, like a calm picture frame to surround the artwork, but for this one I wanted that vivid blue to keep the energy going all the way to the edges. This one measures 42" x 50", and will hopefully make a nice throw or lap quilt for someone. Here it is held by my very tall husband, for scale.
Blue Plate Special
I had thought that the Diamond quilt would use up most of my squares, but it didn’t. Not by a long shot. Three of the 4 fabrics in this one were each from 1-yard precuts I had bought from Walmart, to fill in with the Ghost Quilts. (The other, the darkest blue, was sent to me by someone here, and there was lots of it!) I wanted a few prints that really looked like the fabrics in the book, and these each matched one of the fabrics in the book. As I was cutting these large chunks of fabric, I decided to cut a few 2.5" strips of each, to add to my 2.5" strip stash. Since I was sick of smaller squares after the previous 4 quilt tops, I combined the squares and strips to make these larger blocks. They are each 12.5" finished/13" unfinished, and the whole quilt measured 52" square.
I didn’t have any stash backing, so I picked up some soft grey at Joann’s last week, so I could finish it up. (I’m wondering if that will be my last-ever Joann’s trip?!?!) The binding is leftover scraps of quilt backing, from Ada’s Ghost Quilt. The name came from the fact that I thought the blocks looked like stacks of bowls & plates, and the color palette reminded me of Blue Willow plates.
These quilts will be sold in the Festival, to raise money for the Cunningham Children’s Home, which provides a safe space for youth who suffer from serious emotional and behavioral challenges and autism spectrum disorders that have been caused by abuse, neglect, mental illness, and youth facing homelessness. Just for fun, here are some stats from last year’s Festival:
Lucky you! Your awesome project is featured this week!