Quick kid donations

 As a member of three different organizations that make donation quilts for children's charities, I get to make a lot of small quilts with panels, novelties, donated fabric and practice my quilting on a small scale.  Sometimes these are my usual novelty quilts, but many times not.  Here are some recent trials.

A friend found these llamas on a donation table and I kept some for my stash.  But I know from experience that pink just doesn't make it into my usual I spy quilts very often.  So I decided to use it as a focus fabric instead.  The pattern alternates snowball blocks with framed 9 patch blocks.  I've been trying to print out fewer patterns, so I was trying to just look at the pattern I had put in OneNote on my phone.  And I did the math wrong - so the snowball triangles didn't account for the framed strips on the 9 patch and are smaller than intended.  Of course I didn't have any jade fabric to spare.  But it made for an interesting variation.  I like this pattern a lot because you can do the framed 9 patch using strip piecing, so it goes together quickly.

This next quilt didn't work out so well.  Originally I was tempted to use black instead of the gray but felt it would be too much contrast.  But the gray I chose was too little contrast - I should have tried the black & white photo trick to check.  

I tried doing some custom quilting to emphasize the gray - it didn't really help much.  But I am very happy with the feather detail in the open snowball.  They came out very well and only a few times look like weird toes.  And I got to use my Christmas present of rulers by Bethanne Nemish.  I was honestly surprised with how easy they were - I guess all the practicing lately has paid off.

I had these left over flannel squares and the weird lozenge fabric so I thought I'd try a fancy sashing (from a workshop taught at one of the guilds I attend).  I used a new ruler set by Marti Michelle that worked really well.  The quilt isn't all that great (the pink and yellow with blue is a bit weird), but I hope someone will enjoy how cuddly the flannel is. 

Basic warm wishes to the rescue.  Zoo animals and cats don't exactly go together but I didn't have enough of either fabric, so they will just have to get along.

How to finish a flannel panel?  With left over flannel squares.  I am pleased with how well this turned out - and even more pleased that this was the last of those silly flannel squares!

Another odd panel, I decided to finish it off with some coordinating strips in an asymmetrical arrangement.

One more panel.  Looking through my stash for coordinating fabrics, I found the two blue fabrics sewn together.  No idea where they came from, but I chopped them up to make a 4 patch, added the narrow orange border and called it good.  Kind of like the off center.

The safari fabric was so fun, but there wasn't very much of it.  So I had to use an extra 4 patch in the corner. Fun and bright - my favorite baby quilts.