Teacher Quilts x2

Hi!

This morning as I was sitting down to write this post, I got a very sweet comment on my last post (from over 2 months ago) asking if I was taking a summer break and saying my posts were missed. Well gosh. That made me feel great! So at least one person will be happy to read this. That one person, and my mom.

I guess you could say I have been taking a summer break, though I didn't really try to, it's just the way things go during a time of lots of transitions. And I mean LOTS. We have moved to the Nashville area from Cincinnati, my husband just started a new job, Hendrix just started Kindergarten, Elsie is in full-time preschool, and I'm signed up for some courses and going thru the many ups and downs of searching for full-time-work-after-stay-at-home-motherhood myself. Phew. Of course I've managed to sew a few things during all this time, (how do normal people cope with changes if not with furious stitching?) and now I have quiet mornings alone in the house and I've got that cyclical "I'm gonna blog again, gosh darn it!" feeling going on. Life is made of seasons, so are blogs and ideas and relationships and ambitions and run-on sentences, turn, turn, turn.

Obviously, when you are a slow and seasonal blogger, not all the makes get posted about. (Most of them are on IG though, @alittlegressica.) But I always feel like I owe it to the quilts. The quilts must be honored! Well yeah, they take a long damn time to make.

Back in May, I set out to make a throw quilt for both of Hendrix's preschool teachers from last year as end of the year gifts, just like I did the year before that. I made the same designs, just 10" squares in 6 rows of 6, and I used the opportunity to use up some larger scraps and tie them together with some other fat quarters in my stash.

So with a simple design like that, I always assume it will be quick and don't leave enough time. But then I think I have enough time, so I irrationally think, hey! Let's use this quilt to practice a different free-motion design in every single square! Yeah, that really adds to the work time. I was kicking myself and whining about my shoulders like a big wuss, but it was fun, and definitely good practice. It was great to learn which designs I really enjoyed doing, and which ones were just good to know, but not my go-to's. At first I thought the patchwork of quilting squares you can see on the back was too weird, but after washing, the crinkle brings it all together in a coziness of rad quilting.

This teacher got the more teachery looking quilt- with the primary colors and typographical prints. Those are from some Moda panel I got on sale ages ago, and it ended up being perfect for this purpose.

I wised up on this one and did a quick and simple quilting design. This design really is easy for free-motion quilting, but I loooooove the way it looks and feels on any quilt. Definitely a go-to. 

Now that Hendrix is in school school for like the next 13 years, I'm not sure if his teachers will keep getting quilts. But Elsie's preschool teachers might... I just love giving special people quilts more than anything, so I'm sure I won't be able to resist.

These quilts end up about 57" square. The first is bound in a Lotta Jansdotter Mormor print, and the second in a Carolyn Friedlander Botanics print. Man, those are some sexy bindings, now I need to go bind something...