Quilts for Project Linus

A couple months back, Pat Bravo put out a call for people to sew charity quilts for Project Linus out of her enormous pile of scraps. I jumped right in and volunteered and got a fun package int he mail a short time later. You'd think I would have taken a picture of that pile, huh? Oh well.

I had a few ideas of what I wanted to make but the scraps I got just didn't fit with those ideas. I was stuck. I knew I needed to do something though, so I started cutting them into strings of various widths 1" - 3.5". I sewed them onto copier paper to make diagonal 8.5" x 11" string blocks, being pretty random about placement. I am not usually so scrappy and random so this was pretty hard for me and in the end - I really did not like what I had come up with.

I had to sit on it for a week or two while I thought about how I could make this something I would like better. I thought about turning them into half rectangle triangles with some solids. I considered doing some slash and insert in the opposite direction. Neither of those were jumping out at me as the answer though.

Finally I decided to slice them into skinnier rectangles and see if I could make some arrows out of them. I really needed some negative space to break up all that scrappiness! There are still a few things I would have done differently but overall I'm so much happier with this final layout than I was with the original string blocks.

The navy blue in this is a microfiber sheet so it's SUPER soft. I hope it makes a kid feel comforted and happy when it finds it's new home via Project Linus. Maybe they'll even enjoy the fun variety of free motion quilting I did.

There are actually a ton of quilts that were made for this project and I like so many of them. Pat is giving away 10 yards of fabric to the quilt with the most likes (click the heart on the pin you like) on her Project Linus board. I'd love if you go click mine - you know I can always use more gorgeous fabric in my life!

As an added bonus, this was also one of my goals for this quarter's Finish Along. Yay!