Donation quilts for 2015

I started looking at the quilts and/or tops I had made for donation purposes this year and was pleased to see that I was productive.  Well ... almost productive.  :-)

Some of the donation quilts are actually ready to donate.  Some are 100% quilted but not bound.  But a lot of them are still tops, needing to be quilted.

And that's how my motivation has been this year: I get all fired up to get a quilt done ... and then run out of steam by the time it comes to quilting it.

However, here's what I've accomplished this year so far.  I suspect that even though it is only October, this is as far as I'll get with respect to the creation of any more donation quilts.  That particular bee in my bonnet has been chased away and I'm more interested in completing other UFOs than this bunch. 

Never fear, though, eventually all of these tops *will* get quilted and the whole bunch will get donated.

This is "Audrey's Brights" and was made from the stash of my dear sister-in-law's mother who had passed away.

These are REALLY bright cotton-poly squares, just sewn together in no particular order or fashion.

It's still an unquilted top.

Once the above quilt, "Audrey's Brights" was done, I had EVEN MORE of the really bright fabric leftover and created "Audrey's Bright Hearts".

So, I cut hearts from the brightly printed fabric, and fused them as appliques to be the focus squares.  I surrounded the hearts with the really bright fabric.

This is also unquilted.

I had a lot of fun making these fused appliqued cupcakes!  I alternated the cupcake blocks with 4-patch blocks and did an all-over pantograph.

Yup, this one is actually quilted!

The backing is a piece of fleece yardage that is an all-over print of cupcakes ... which is where I got the inspiration for the top.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up some fleece that had dog bones printed all over.  I haven't a clue where it came from, as I'm not really a dog person.

But to coordinate with the dog bone fleece, I dug into my stash and found two chunks of fabric with dog pictures on them .. one with a red background and the other with a blue background.  Once again, I don't know where the dog fabric came from.  It certainly didn't look familiar!  I can only assume it was given to me.

I have accent squares of red and blue fabric and used a paw print fabric as a sashing of sorts.  I *think* this is a disappearing 9-patch pattern, but I didn't say anything about that in my notes, so I'm not completely sure.

In real life, the center part of the quilt looks a bit muddled but I can see from this distance photo, it doesn't look quite as bad as I thought it did close up.  :-)

These are "doodle cloths" that, once I had completely used up the fabric with my doodles and practicing, I cut them up and bound them to be used by my veterinarian as liners in the cages where their animal clients are kept.  These doodle cloth quilts are puffier than the thin terry towels the staff normally uses to insulate the animals from the wire mesh bottom of the cages.

I'm happy to not throw away the doodle cloths; the vet is happy to get substantial cage liners; the animals (I imagine) are happy to lay on something more comfortable.

This donation quilt is a complete disaster, I'm sad to say.  I did have a layout that I used as an inspiration but because I didn't have enough of the pre-printed hexagon fabric to replicate the original layout, I had to come up with something else.

And .. yuck ... this was it.  I'm not happy with it BUT not unhappy enough to rip out all the appliqued hexies and figure what else to do.

It'll remain as it is.  Sometimes quilts just turn out yucky.

This quilt was inspired by another hexie layout that turned out differently from the original.  But in THIS case, I'm happy with the finished quilt!

I used this top as an opportunity to try a different feather motif in the borders.  I really do enjoy quilting feathers.  Once I "discovered" the 'hump and bump" method that Karen McTavish uses, it made sense to me and I could actually *do* them with some degree of attractiveness.

Now, it's the only method I use for feathers.

And here's a close-up of the feather motif.  I'm really rather pleased with the way it turned out.