Quilt Festival

Better late than never, right?
I finally decided to participate in the online Quilt Festival hosted by Amy at Park City Girl. Thanks Amy!. Click on over and look at the hundreds of different quilt blogs and the beautiful quilts they have made. Here is my contribution.

So, I have 2 quilts to talk about. My son attends a wonderful Co-operative preschool here in Ann Arbor Michigan. Every February they have a silent auction to raise funds for the school. Last school year I decided to make a quilt for each class (a 3 year old class and a 4 year old class) using the handprints of the kids.

This is the finished quilt of the 4's class. The kids hands are used for the sunflower blossoms and leaves. The teacher's handprints were used for the sun, since she is what makes our children grow.

I traced both hands of every kid in the class.

I used the biggest hands for the sunflowers.

Smaller hands and those who didn't want to spread their fingers apart were used for the leaves.

On the top and bottom borders are the outline of each child's hand (just one) with their name written in the the palm. I then quilted around each hand. I don't remember exactly how I quilted the whole quilt. I zigzagged over all the applique pieces but other than that I don't remember.

Here is the 3's class. They were a bunch of tulips. The teacher's hands were once again used as the sun.

The kids hands and names were placed at the bottom this time (for both quilts the names were in alphabetical order).

A slightly closer look at the finished quilt. There was no pattern for the leaves I just cut out a whole bunch and then played with the leaves as I laid everything out.

Some kids were used for butterflies (my son is the middle butterfly).

Pretty tulips.

These quilts were a lot of work. Cutting out all those little hands was more difficult than I thought it would be and attaching them took longer than I thought as I bought a new sewing machine in the middle of making these quilts. Overall I was very happy with them and glad to donate them to the school for the auction. I am not doing it again this year but I might try to make a similar quilt using my kids and all their cousins.