A friend from the coast and my next-door neighbor are both expecting, and we wanted to make them both something special. The girls and I shopped the remnant section at Fabric Depot, as well as the fabric shelves at our local thrift store, and put together two forest-themed baby quilts.
This one is a Rain Forest theme for the next-door neighbor. We used thrifted flannel sheets (triple layered) for the batting and a thrifted cotton sheet for the backing fabric (thrifted sheets = my favorite frugal quilt backing).
This was the first time in years I’ve made a separate bias binding instead of doing a self-binding backing. What a pain it was!! I forgot how long it takes to make, and iron and while the effect was nice, I won’t use it on my next few quilts…
The next quilt is for a friend who is an amateur mycologist – it’s a Forest Floor quilt, complete with mushroom and tree-ring prints.
The quilt is just a simple four-patch with some mustard-colored Egyptian-print thrifted fabric for the back and binding. Bea helped me lay out the pattern and cut some of the blocks, Ruth helped sew about half of the 4-patch blocks, and sewed the borders on.
Now, to find a time to drag 4 kiddos to stand in line at the Post Office so we can send it out….
I have come to realize that there is absolutely no way for me to maintain a clean house, work on learning projects with the kids, get the yard/poultry chores done, cook meals, care for an infant, and accomplish any serious crafting. It’s just not possible to keep up with it all, no matter how it may appear from the limited perspective of crafty-homeschool-mom blogs. For the moment, the unfolded laundry is piling up, the living room is home to dust bunnies and crumbs galore and the toy basket looks like it exploded all over the front rooms, but that’s okay, because we had a great time working together to bless our friends in a small way.
And, now to have a “cleaning and catch-up day” before we start all over with a new quilt for another friend expecting an addition to her family…