Holiday Doll Quilt Time

4/6/15 Reviving this post for Tuesday Archives (on Wednesday); after the first two, they are QAYG.

The time for doll and teddy bear quilts for the Fire Fighters Toy and Joy program has rolled around again. Last year I made around a dozen in November/December and thought to work more steadily during this year instead of all in the last month. Um hmm. Another good intention down the drain. So here I am with four finished and hoping to make ten or twelve.

These two are the quick ones, the way I usually make them: a simple block and border sewn to a back, then minimally quilted.

20 x 20

A friend gave me the novelty fabric and I thought it needed multicolor points. The pinwheels are from the “bonus” triangles left from the star points.

16 x 16

The size was determined by the width of the piece of red cuddle fabric–I had originally planned another plain yellow border. The squares came from a welcome packet at a recent guild retreat (Alas, I’ve forgotten the fabric line and the label is gone–if you recognize it, add it in the comments please.) Looking at the finished product, I see much better color distributions were possible. No matter how much I play with arrangements, I always see something in the final product that I wish I’d placed differently.

The next two have needed more work than I usually do on toy items. But it has been good practice.

200 x 20

20x 20

These started with blocks already quilted.  I’d made them for Soy Amado (now concluded); however, my 12 1/2-inch blocks shrank when I quilted them and were no longer usable in that project.They are quilted more densely than I’d normally do, but it was good FMQ practice. And it was nice to quilt such small pieces. The ladders came from Leah Day’s website and seemed perfect for a firetruck block. The flowers on the black print were an attempt at extending the fabric design into the quilting.

I’d watched several YouTube tutorials on assembling the pieces. The process is simple enough, but tedious. And even the 12 1/2 inch side under the machine harp made it difficult to keep the topstitching line straight on the final seam on my Featherweight–currently my only machine. If I’m going to wrestle a piece anyway, I may as well FMQ it whole and wrestle there without the tedium.

I have a couple of these prequilted blocks yet to do, then I can get back to the simpler method.

I’ll be linking with Link a Finish Friday, TGIFF, and Finish it Up Friday (as soon as the links are available). It’s always fun to see other peoples’ finishes, but more fun when I have one too. And the first two were NewFOs for November, and the total ten are not finished, so linking up with Barbara’s NewFO . It’s as much fun to check out new starts as old finishes.

ETA: links