Another Preemie Quilt

What a difference 24 hours can make! Yesterday it was too hot to do much of anything. Today we have rain - real rain, not just that drizzly stuff we get so often around here - and it's so much cooler I've got long sleeves on again. This world never ceases to amaze me. (Yes, very often I do feel like an alien, like I wasn't made to live on this planet.)

Remember I said I was continuing to work with my red, white, and blue flannel scraps, shooting for 8.5" (raw) blocks? I made 17 of them and set 16 into this preemie top:

It's 32" square. Normally I design my preemie quilts to finish at 24 x 30" but both of these flannel jobs have come out bigger. Hopefully they will go to premature infants who thrive and get to be bigger babies. :- )

Here are the backs of the quilts. The red striped flannel is the back of the medallion top (which you can see in the previous post) and the cocker spaniels are on the back of the quilt above.

I don't know how well you can see the lines of stitching that hold the two layers together. Once I have a top complete I lay it, right sides together, on a flannel backing fabric. I trim the backing to size, and then pin and seam the two pieces together, leaving an opening about the size of my fist to turn the quilt through. When I have it turned right side out I make sure the corners are poked out all the way and take it to the ironing board to press the whole thing nice and flat. I pay particular attention to the edges so that you don't see the backing peeking over the edge from the front. I don't bother to hand stitch the opening closed. Instead I do two rows of topstitching around the perimeter of the quilt. The first row is about an eighth of an inch from the edge of the quilt and the second row is maybe an eighth of an inch inside the first. Then I find a way to do a bit of quilting on the interior of the blankets. Mostly I look for a square to outline or some other major shape that I can go around in the middle of the top. It's not like I use the quilting to add a design element in these little blankets. It's strictly there out of necessity. I try to make it as invisible as possible.

Then yesterday it was too hot to even think about sewing. It was too hot to think really. So, without thinking, I dumped the remains of my flannel scraps onto the cutting table and started sorting. It took a couple of movies to get the job done but in the end this is all I had left.

That's a 12" pizza box with the smallest bits and strings.

The grocery sack is full of wider and longer strips and the leftover chunks of flannels I've used in previous baby quilts. On top I have a bag of squares I've cut that can be used as leaders and enders. All of this has been tidied away into the closet to clear the way for the next project. I have quite the list I could choose from but I may just get out my scrappy orphan blocks and see whether I can whip up a third preemie quilt while I'm in that mode...