Sunday, December 28, 2008

Two for the Price of One

Last year some time I was at Quilts by the Bay and saw some cute fabirc designed by Loralie Harris. You know her stuff ... cute line drawings of women , a little naughty, a little nice. Well the Doggie Delight fabric is just as cute and it had been put into a kit called 'How Much is That Doggie in the Window?'. It was darling and had these incredibly neat paw print blocks to outline the central panel of fabric. I took it out the other day, intending to make it into a wndow shade for a window that the dogs like to sit in and bark at everyone. My hopes were dashed when I realised that the panel would not make a great window shade and that the paw print blocks required a zillion bitty pieces of fabric to complete.

On to Plan B. I added a few borders and added a bunch of 3" inch blocks as the exterior borders. Here's what I came up with using the fabric in the kit:
It came out to about 54" x 71".... a good size for a twin size bed of some dog lover OR a great size for my three to lie under during this cold weather. I haven't bound the edges yet but I intend to do them all by machine... double stitching wherever I can in case the crew decides to chew on the edges... they seem to do that a lot with my quilts.

While I was sorting the scraps I realised I had a lot of strips about 22" long and various widths. Instead of putting them into the scrap bin I sewed them together, added some black fabric and ended up with this Chinese Coins design quilt top.
Its about 40" by 54" and I don't know what I will do with it. Heck, you can never have too many quilts when it gets close to freezing here! And, does anyone know why this design is called Chinese Coins? It certainly doesn't look like any coins I have ever seen.

So that's one project almost completed and another I need to finish up. The larger one I will probably finish tomorrow. The smaller one will probably need to wait until I can find a black batt before it can be quilted. Even though I am hibernating like a bear these days, its nice to know I can get something done.

I hope your Christmas went well and that the coming New Year brings lots of good things to you and yours.

2 comments:

Sue said...

What a great quilt !! Any doggy lover would love that one.

Unknown said...

Beautiful quilt! My son has six blankets on him tonight! In answer to your question about the name - I've heard it's because Chinese coins traditionally had a hole in the middle. That's what they would look like when they were all stacked up on a spike.