Postage Stamp Quilt

At the BAMQ meeting on Saturday, over at the Community Giving table, the ever organized Peggy had handy-dandy irresistible kits put together for making up a small quilt top. Included along with the helpful illustrated instructions are five already completed Postage Stamp blocks, enough fabric to make the big HSTs, and squares for making the partial Postage Stamp blocks seen in the pattern.

I'll be using these as leaders and enders while I do some more piecing on another project.

And over on the free table, I at first resisted, but then gave in and took this FQ from one of the recent Alice in Wonderland fabric lines to add to my "words on fabric" bin. I thought the little illustrations and coloring were super interesting. Yes, I've already added this to my Fabric-IN spreadsheet for the 2025 Fabric Tracker.
 

Using an AccuQuilt

I recently got the chance to try out my friend, Debbie Wambaugh's AccuQuilt Studio Fabric Cutter before she packed up and moved away (sniff sniff, miss you already Debbie!).
  
I don't normally do a lot of traditional block quilting so I had to come up with a project out of my stash to take over and cut out.  I saw Mark Lipinski's great recent quilt design, Goose Chase in Quilty magazine,

You can buy a digital version of this pattern right here.

 I didn't have a lot of time, so I decided to cut out all the small triangles in lime green, orange instead of pink and black for the colors. And instead of a white background, I chose a variety of  white with black prints.My plan is to cut the bigger ones out myself (since there's a whole lot less of them!)

The AccuQuilt triangle die has the corners cut off of the triangles, which is great, it will make it so much easier to fit those triangles together. I always struggle with that, so any help is appreciated.

Gosh it was so easy to use, once you get the fabric positioned, it's just an easy turn of the handle. I can really see now why people are so excited about these gizmos.  I need to come up with some good reasons that I need one because it was super fun to play with, I can imagine a lot of possibilities.  They have a zillion dies in all kinds of shapes (including strips), so I think I'm going to save up for one.

Sometimes holding the rotary cutter for more than a few minutes gets very hard for me, as my right hand hasn't really recovered from my finger injury a few years back. It's a safety issue as well as an accuracy issue.

Besides the fiddling around with getting the fabric the right size and shape to go into the cutter, the only other big downside is that there is lot of fabric wastage using this cutter.  Which I'm sure with practice you can minimize a whole lot more than my first attempt. Of course, since I love using scraps this isn't really a problem.

So two thumbs up from a novice user with this new tool, putting it on the I-Want-List.

Quilts For Kids

My Downy Touch of Comfort quilt kit arrived!

Aren't these prints so cute and cheery? It has a little embroidered label and some precut strips, a postage paid label to send it back, and it comes with an easy, simple suggested pattern. They also ask that if you can, to make a second quilt and send it along with the one made with the kit. Hey, why not? I have a whole big bin of kid prints that aren't getting used at the moment.

The organization Quilts for Kids began a few years ago, trying to use up fabric that was ending up in landfills. But the organizations recently picked up Downy as a sponsor and are going big in this project, 10,000 quilts is the goal!

I just thought I'd post this in case you haven't heard of this worthy project and want to participate.