Loose Change

My mother's church group in Oregon decided to hold a quilt show last year -- and it was so well-attended and so fun, they did it again this year!

For this years' show, the group issued a challenge that they called "Loose Change."  It was encouragement to people to go through their fabric stashes and use what they had.  Nickel packs (5-inch squares) were designated as "nickels"; "dimes" were 10-inch squares (otherwise sold as "Layer Cakes"); fat quarters were "quarters," of course; scraps were "pennies"; and 2 1/2-inch strips (often rolled together in sets and marketed as "Jelly Rolls") were designated as "dollars."  Over the first months of the year, Mom and her friend Debbie had plans to teach classes to show creative ways to use these elements in the creation of new quilts for the challenge.

Sadly, Mom was unable to participate much in teaching these classes.  Dad was hospitalized shortly after Christmas and spent about six weeks in critical condition in a hospital three hours from home.  Mom was given use of a room in the hospital and she took projects and sewing machines, but her time and focus was really spent helping Dad.  He passed away a couple of weeks before the quilt show, which was held in mid-April.

In January and February I went to stay with Mom.  We visited and planned late into each night, ate at restaurants, and did some fabric shopping.  She expressed interest in having a quilt pattern to give away at the upcoming quilt show that could use each form of their "loose change."  She also wanted to make a creative quilt that looked like it had money on the front and she found some fabric to put on the back that looked like dollar bills.  We had so many ideas!

Inspired by a quilt design we saw on the wall of a quilt shop, I came up with a pattern and made it in two colorways.  The first was done in kelly green batiks, along with other fabrics in hues suggestive of dimes, nickels, pennies and golden dollars; the other (surprisingly more popular) was in white with green  30's and 40's reproduction fabrics.  My sister, expecting her second child, expressed an interest in having the green one to match her children's bedroom -- so two more quilts were assembled, quilted and mailed for her birthday, later in April (one of these is pictured above).

The white sashing could have been cut from 1 1/4-inch strips, which is what we get when we cut the 2 1/2-inch "dollar" strips in half, lengthwise; instead, I cut 4 1/2-inch strips and sewed narrow lengths of green along the top:  the tiny green squares required slightly more than a single 2 1/2-inch strip could provide.  Sixteen 4-patch blocks were made from four of these 2 1/2-inch strips (two light and two darker).

5-inch "nickel" pieces, which could have been made into half-square triangle blocks, were cut down into 4 1/2-inch squares.  The seven 10-inch squares were also trimmed (to be 9 1/4"), to accommodate the units made by 2 1/2-inch strips; they could have been made into quarter-triangle squares with more work and a little less obvious waste -- but the idea was to keep things simple for the pattern.  The result was slightly larger than a square baby quilt; I added additional squares and some extra narrow borders to bring my green throw (pictured here, exploded and finished) to a more useful size.  This has been a pretty popular quilt around our house, resting at the moment at the foot of my bed.  My father-in-law particularly admired it, so perhaps a fifth one will be in the works for Christmas.

What with the interruption of a funeral and a load of other projects, this quilt was not completely bound by the time we were supposed to leave for the eight-hour trip to stay with Mom and help with her yard work (and quilt show) over Spring Break.  Mom's friend Debbie came to my rescue, hand-stitching the binding in time for the show!  A week or so later, when my sister's quilts arrived unbound (her new baby will be a girl and her old one is a boy -- and I wasn't sure how matched she wanted their quilts --), generous Debbie whisked the package home and promptly bound them for her.

Mom's idea for the quilt she could make for the show was simple enough, but she ran out of time.  She sent me home from the funeral with the fabrics we had bought when Dad was in the hospital, along with some simple verbal instructions.  Using fusible interfacing and sewing right sides together, I stitched around the edges of circles of fabric to make "coins."  Snipping around the curved edges of each seam allowance, I turned the fabric circles right side out through a slit in the interfacing and finger-pressed the curves until each circle was fairly flat.  It was a simple matter to iron these circles onto the charcoal-tone background sheet; they stayed in place as they were machine-stitched in place.  Pennies and nickels were appliqued with a straight stitch, but I used a more decorative stitch on the other coins to simulate the ridged edge of nickels, dimes, and so on.  It was machine quilted with a lavender metallic thread.  Mom had fun pointing out the "pair-a-dime" and the "two cents" in the corner.  She appliqued the quilt's title when she entered the quilt in a later show.

Baby Quilts for Grandma

What would Grandma want for Christmas?  Why baby quilts, of course -- Grandma has as many babies as everyone else, put together!

Janet, my mother-in-law, has more than fifty grandchildren; she is now in the Great-Grandma business.  Most years, my Christmas gifts to her have been stashes of playthings for her Grandma house:  in years past, I have given bins of Duplo Lego sets, vintage dolls revitalized with sets of handmade dresses, and scores of dress-up clothes (a perennial favorite).  This year, I noticed that her baby quilts are getting a little threadbare, so I began working on a couple in fabrics that I knew she would like.  They were not completed until after the new year, but she said she didn't mind.

When their children were young, my in-laws spent eleven years in Hawaii; six of their eleven children were born during these years.  Ten years ago, just before retiring, my father-in-law did an exchange and worked for a year at BYU-Hawaii, where he had worked before.  Their old friends were delighted to see them!  While they were there, my husband and I paid them a visit.  The island was rained out that week, but I gave Janet some money and she later brought back these fabric strips for me to put in a quilt.

They were a little irregularly-shaped, so they stayed in my stash until this year's need.   The design for this baby quilt was the solution to the problem of how to waste as little as possible.

Janet loves batik fabrics and our shared favorite color is a beautiful turquoise hue.  This swirled batik seemed to soften the bright Hawaiian prints for a baby quilt.  Both quilts share a similar flannel back and are bound with the same swirled batik.

The second quilt was an assortment of bright batiks, cut into squares.  Janet has a quilt on the wall in her study that she made of a rainbow of similarly assorted brights, so I took my cue from that.  She seemed to like the quilts and has temporarily put them on display on her front room couches.  They are machine quilted, which I figured would hold them together well through multiple washings.

My Lesson in Machine Quilting

I learned free-motion quilting from my mother, several years ago.  She lived in Washington and I had a baby shower and needed to take a gift (that evening), so I telephoned her.  Mom told me the basics -- that you need to eliminate the influence of the feed dogs (either by covering or by lowering) and that it works best if you use a presser foot designed to allow for the bulk of a quilt.  She told me to lower the tension and that I should secure the fabrics to the batting using a fabric spray, as well as encouraging me to get a fairly low-loft batting (and she had a suggestion for that).

That first baby quilt was pretty rough!  I arrived late to the shower and found it packed.  They opened my gift and passed it around so everyone could see it -- and I was mortified, since the stitching was so irregular I feared a baby might catch its toe on the biggest threads!  Ladies I did not know (my neighbor had only recently moved from California) were asking me questions that indicated they knew much more about it than I did.  My only comfort was...there was no real comfort in this situation, but I imagined these ladies would probably never see me again.

Needless to say, I kept at it.  The borrowed foot was returned to my mother-in-law and I got one of my own for my birthday (that was the birthday date that was interrupted when my husband got called to bail out one of his business associates from jail and never was paid back).  That birthday present has been well-used and was a great investment! 

I got better over time.  The positioning spray had to be used outside (it was cancer-causing and inhibited breathing, apparently) and it was expensive and somewhat problematic, so after awhile I gave up on it and use straight pins instead.  I learned baby quilts were easier to work on, but even when the backing shifts, it is not too noticeable (unless I sew over folds on the back), once shrinkage and the charming puckering sets in.  I had hand-quilted some twin-sized quilt tops for my daughters and had one left; what had taken weeks and late-night books on tape to finish was accomplished during a single movie (a long movie, but I was able to watch the end of it with my girls).  I still love to hand quilt, but usually a quick baby gift is ready for binding after an hour on the machine.

A few months after I started machine quilting, I went to visit my mother.  She had some projects for me to do and she asked me to show her how to machine quilt.  "But, Mom," I remonstrated, "you taught me!"  She then admitted she had never done it: she had once had it explained to her and she had merely been repeating the instructions!  The real key is practice. 

Potholders, like the ones used to illustrate this article, are great practice:  they are a small project and the backing stays pretty stiff and straight.  When you are done, you're done.  You can take comfort in knowing they will get used and stained and thrown away.  And, as a bonus, you can practice making and installing binding (a 10" potholder has a lot less investment and the same number of corners as the biggest king-sized quilt you can imagine).