May Color Block Quilt -- I Love You This Much (room)!

 All of the Color Block quilts for 2025 will be suitable for babies.*  If you are new to Color Blocks Scrap Quilts, every quilt starts with an 8" sixteen patch block made from squares.  I have cut all of my scraps into 2 1/2" squares and piece up some Color Blocks when I need some brainless sewing.  Then I can grab a few and quickly piece together a quilt.

May's quilt is I Love You This Much(room)!  I was thinking of Alice in Wonderland, The Smurfs, and Mario Bros. when I designed this mushroom quilt

I added some fun texture in the background by quilting with a 2" Offset Circle Stencil.  

Join the FREE (for now) Color Blocks 2025 class to download the pattern and watch the machine quilting tutorial.

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*This month's quilt has buttons on it.  If you are making for a baby, do not add the buttons.

Squared Away Cutie Quilt -- Pretty in Pink

One of my favorite Cutie Quilts to machine quilt is Squared Away.  I love to quilt ribbon candy in the background and let the Cutie Fabrics POP!  

Last year I decided that 2025 was "The Year of Baby Quilts" and it is proving true.  My circle of family and friends are helping me with this pledge by providing me with new babies who need quilts!

I made this pink Squared Away for a sweet baby girl due in July.  I can show it now since the baby shower was last weekend.

Whenever I need to tidy up my sewing room, which is always, I start stitching a quilt with ribbon candy.  I tidy in between each block.  It's silly, but I make progress that way.

Do you have a favorite baby quilt pattern?  

Do you have any tricks to help you tidy your sewing room?

ABC Stencil -- Circle Heart on a Atkinson Designs Twist and Shout Quilt

 I just finished quilting my sister's birthday quilt (HBD, Sharon!).

I subscribe to Primitive Gatherings Quilt Subscription Box and received a pack of five fat quarters.  I wanted to use them together in a project so I flipped through all of my patterns until I found an out-of-print Atkinson Designs pattern called Twist and Shout that used five fat quarters plus contrast, background, border, and binding.  

I pieced this quilt top at a Sewcation Retreat in Sturbridge, MA in January.  My sister saw the top and called dibs, so I needed to quilt it up in time for her birthday.  

Ribbon Candy is always my first quilting choice, so I considered quilting all of the print strips with ribbon candy.  That would leave the background and the black pinwheels.  These pieces aren't very large and any custom quilting would be teeny tiny, so I sadly, regrettably opted against ribbon candy.  I had to rest in a darkened room to recover for a while before coming up with quilting plan B.

My sister liked this quilt because of the black/white/red colors, the colors of the school she recently retired from.  So the color was the important part of the quilt, not the quilting. I decided to quilt this simply by adding some texture with my ABC Stencil Circle Heart alternating directions and placed in a grid.

I love the circles on this quilt and the texture after washing the pounce powder on it was divine!

Thread color was my next choice, and I thought of black, cream, red, and gray.  I love red so decision made!

I impressed myself by getting this quilted, bound, and mailed in time for her to receive it for her birthday.  I think it's due to arrive a day early even!  I can't be the only quilter who is late with gifts, right?

I filmed the quilting of this quilt and posted it in As the Bobbin Turns, where I post all of my subscriber-only videos.  You can join monthly or annually to peek over my shoulder while I quilt all of my quilts on my home sewing machine.

A last Happy Birthday to my sister, who is the boots-on-the-ground 24/7 daughter to our elderly mother.  She does a great job caring for our mom and I'm so grateful for her.

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• Red 50-weight Konfetti cotton thread
• Red 80-weight DecoBob polyester thread
• ABC Stencil -- Circle Heart
• Batt Scooters

Jack's Star Cutie Quilt -- Machine Quilting on a Home Sewing Machine

Jack's Star is one of the top-selling Cutie Patterns.  

This quilt is quick and easy to piece It uses a Cutie Pack of fabric (16 fat eighths) plus background and binding fabric.  I chose a Knit Together Cutie Pack from Benartex because who doesn't love cats and yarn?  (Cat-haters, please don't feel the need to answer)

I used my ABC Circle Heart Stencil to quilt long lines of hearts.

Then I stitched switchbacks between the lines of hearts to add texture and to make the hearts POP!

This simple combination makes the quilting look far more complicated than it is!

My daughter loves cats and quilts and maybe she'll need me to make some baby items from Knit Together in the near future.

Watch how I stitched this quilt:

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Jack's Star Cutie Pattern

Knit Together Cutie Pack

ABC Circle Heart Stencil

Batt Scooters

Waiting for Baby!

I'm expecting another grandbaby in late June.  I have had their quilt stored safely in my linen closet since 2017 and was excited to finally give it to them!

I have many more quilts here for them and many more quilts planned, but this was THE ONE!  It's made with organic cotton and is gender-neutral and was perfect for the shower.

Is it wrong that I'm pleased that the party-goers clapped when my DIL opened the quilt?  Because I am.

The pattern is Jack's Star, a Cutie Pattern I designed and named after my late father.  It's a great quilt to show off larger prints on fabrics.  The next Jack's Star quilt I make will use My Little Sunshine fabric.

Isn't that fabric adorable?

Like all Cutie Patterns, this quilt starts with 16 fat-eighths and adds background, borders, or other fabrics.  Jack's Star is so versatile because it doesn't require any border yardage.  A simple pack of fat eighths (or fat quarters cut in half) will do the job!

Maybe when I make this next quilt, I'll get another grandbaby?  If only it worked that way!