Hands2Help Charity Quilts Completed!

Hello everyone! I hope the start to your month of June is going well. We just returned from a long vacation (totally awesome and I have some more posts on that coming up to share with you), but I had a lot of sewing to do right away.

I've completed both of my charity quilts that I pledged for the Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge. It was such fun putting these together. I completed the challenge with my mother. Together we made 6 quilts - 3 for each type of charity.

Here are the two fishy quilts I put together:

Obviously these are both very similar. The first one has more pink and purple in it, so I consider it to be more of a girl quilt. The second one has more blue and green in it, so I consider it to be more of a boy quilt. I hope the children who receive them will enjoy them. Maybe they'll even make a new friend by talking to the other kid that gets the same type of quilt.

I decided to donate both of mine to the Russian initiative of the Quilts Beyond Borders charity (my mother donated hers to the Ethiopian initiative). I have just a bare twinge of connection to Russia since I studied a couple semesters of the language while I was in college. I've never been there, but I hope to travel there some day!

For these quilts I had planned on doing an all over pebble/bubble quilting. I think that would have worked, but I changed my mind at the last second. I decided to do what I like to refer to as my "seaweed" quilting. It's loops with some free motion lines connecting them. I think it makes it look like the bubble type of seaweed that you sometimes see washed up on the shore.

This quilting went really fast - it only took me about 2 hours on each quilt to do the quilting - then another 45 or so minutes to do the binding. This was also the first time I had ever completed the binding totally by machine. It was sooooo fast that I'm debating doing it again. I'm just very fond of the way hand stitched binding looks that I'm sure I won't make the change completely. However, these should definitely stand up to multiple washes!

For the back of the quilt I chose a green stripe on each one. I felt that the front of the quilt was very child friendly and I didn't want the entire thing to just be for children. I'm hoping the children who receive these quilts keep them for a long time. If they do, they may not want everyone to see a bunch of rainbow fish all the time, so that's why I chose the more grown-up green stripe for the back. I still kept the binding as the rainbow colors so some of the quilt top will always show through. ;)

My second quilt is in the wash right now getting all crinkly ad nice. The first is completely ready to go and folded. I've got to get a box to send these off on Monday!

And, here's one more shot of my little cat Leia. She snuck in while I wasn't looking and decided to test out the second quilt right before I put the binding on. I think she approves! I do have some fish blocks left over, so maybe I'll have to make her and her sister Sasha a little kitty quilt to snuggle on. I have a feeling they'll still try out my quilts even if they have their own though! :)

So, hope you all are having a great weekend! If you want to check out the other quilts that were made for the challenge, please head to Sarah's blog at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and see the other linked up projects. Mine will be there too, toward the bottom, since I'm cutting it close to the wire! There are some really great quilts there, and if you weren't able to join in this year I think she'll have the challenge again next year. :) Happy quilting everyone!