My mother and mother-in-law are each receiving a decorative pillow this year. I put two orphaned basket quilt blocks to use, added leaf and yo-yo shaped flower appliques. Just something a little different than the usual gift of candy.

Picture Purrfect Kitties with purrsonality! This was a fun applique quilt. I used raw edge applique technique for this quilt top.

“ANT”titude  50″ x 56″ Picnic Quilt

Fun quilt full of ants stealing the picnic food. Fusible applique. My favorite are the ants at the bottom left by the glass of pink lemonade.

Ribbon Cone Flowers, by Castilleja Cotton

For this quilt I pieced the background, then sandwiched and quilted it. Once the quilting was done, I then fused the flowers in place, buttonhole stitched the stems and leaves, and free motioned quilted the flowers and veins on the leaves.

Tea Party, by Lauren + Jessi Jung

Even though this pattern is designed for needle turn applique, I used fusible web and stitched around each piece using invisible thread. It went together much quicker than I expected. It is a cute Springtime quilt – just like the pattern says.

Both are shop models for Fabrics and Friends Quilt Shoppe, Roanoke, IN.

I have NO grays in my stash! None! So I used tans instead. I’m pleased with the results.

And here are the blocks from the Craftsy BOM using the same fabrics as in the basket block. What a difference a pattern and color placement make!

The youtube instructions say to open the Jelly Roll and sew the strips end to end (mitered) just as they come from the Jelly Roll. That is what I did for the first quilt, but I didn’t like how the strips of similar color did not show up the mitered seam. Having that mitered seam pop, I think, is the whole point of this method.

For the next quilt I used a baby jelly roll – just 20 strips of fabric. I mixed up the strips instead of working straight through the jelly roll, and liked the results much better. The top ended up being a perfect crib size quilt.

Next, I moved on to 5″ strips – Deborah Roehm, the quilt shop owner, wondered if a 5″ strip would work for this method. We didn’t see any reason for it not to work – so I made two of them. A flannel, and a batik. (Batik pictured below)

I love the look of the 5″ strips! So dramatic, and the mitered seams show up well. I think we used 20 strips. Deborah did the cutting and I did the sewing. We also made two crib size using flannel.(no pictures) Deb cut kits for her Saint Patrick’s Day Sale and they all sold!

Here’s just a few items I have and would like to use:  Scrap Master Ruler, Pineapple Ruler, Tri-recs tools, Boondoggle Ruler, Flip-flop template, Drunkard’s Path templates, Leaves Galore, and Easy Angle.

Really, what interests me right now are all the gadgets and things hanging on quilt shop notion walls.  Why all those rulers and templates and things and no one using them? So I’m on a personal mission to figure them out myself. I’m starting with Sweet Mint Pattern and Templates by Laundry Basket Quilts. Just got them and fabric this week, so will show the results in a later post.

If you hop over to Nancy’s blog – let me know what you think. I’ll be posting reviews as I get crack-a-lacking on my stuff here.

And for March we are to work on #8. Yeah! #8 on my list is a pattern and fabric I bought a few years ago but never got to it. I’m looking forward to working on this – Fire Escape pattern by Atkinson Designs. My goal is to have a complete top made this month. And then move it to the “needs to be FMQ” pile. Once I’m confident in my FMQ skills, I’ll attempt to work on tops in that pile. Pictures are the fabrics I’m planning on using.

The UFO challenge is sponsored by Judy Laquidara of Patchwork Times.

My daughter says the blooms look like eggs. Eggs or not, I still love this block!