Starting Jessica's Freebird Picnic Quilt and Making Progress on Not Quite Nutty as a Fruitcake

Whoa, that was a lengthy title.

My sister-in-law commissioned me to make a quilt for her bed. She picked the design and the fabric and I set to work on it Wednesday night. The pattern requires a jelly roll of the desired fabric and a neutral jelly roll to yield a square quilt. Because I'm making a twin size quilt, I bought an additional charm pack of each type of fabric so I can add an extra row of the design. My SIL chose the fabric for the backing (also to be used as a 4 inch border around the perimeter of the design) and the binding fabric.

I started off cutting the Freebird charm pack in half, giving me ~80 2 1/2 x 5 inch rectangles.


I then took the Moda Bella Solids Snow charm pack and sewed a rectangle to either side of the charm square.


The next step will be cutting the new units down to two 4 1/2 inch squares. This will give me the subunits needed to start creating the layout. After that, I can follow the tutorial by sewing each Freebird jelly roll strip to a Snow strip along the long edge and then cutting the new pairs into 4 1/2 inch squares again.

I love when fabric looks even better in person than when you see it online. I liked Freebird when I first saw it, but some of the prints that I was only so-so on looked so cute in real life, like these butterflies...


and these grande dots.


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Since I like to work on multiple projects at a time, I'm making a disappearing nine-patch quilt to gift. I started this one back in May when I started Frolic Around the House and Peekaboo Blush. These blocks have been sitting around for a few weeks. I used three charm packs, sewn into 12 nine-patch blocks. I had enough charm squares to make 14 blocks, but I only want 12 for this quilt. After sewing the nine-patches, I cut them in half vertically and horizontally to get the start of the disapearring nine-patch.


I played around with layouts for a while, but settled on this symmetrical, formal design because I think it will suit the recipient the best. There will be 12 of these new blocks and they'll each be separated by sashing of Moda Bella Solids in Milk.


Since the last two quilts I made were done in a short timeframe, I'm hoping I can whip these babies out pretty fast as well. I guess we'll see. I feel obligated to get Jessica her quilt as soon as possible since it's not something just for me to use around the house. It all depends on the mister's work schedule since I usually sew on the nights when he's working late.

I'm also REALLY wanting to make new throw pillows for my living room. Kati brought two of her recent pillows to our quilt guild meeting last week and I seriously was drooling over them. One more thing to add to my to-do list.