A quilt for Relay for Life

A about a month and a half ago I was asked by a girl at work to make a quilt to be raffled off to help raise money for our relay for life team. I have been ridiculously excited, mainly because I don't often get to make something just because I think it's pretty, usually I have a recipient in mind. I had two charm packs sitting around, both Tanya Whelan collections --Delilah and French Hatbox. I knew when I got them that I wanted to pair them with white and make a bunch of half square triangles, and this gave me just the occasion I was looking for. I made them by putting the two squares together, one white and one printed, and sewing 1/4" on either side of the center line and then cutting down the center. It saved me from actually having to deal with triangles which was great. I ended up with 4" finished squares. My 1/4" foot saved my life again and made all my triangles have nice points! It was lovely.


I tried a number of different layouts, the possibilities with half square triangles are really endless, and finally landed on the one I wanted to use. It is one I saw on Red Pepper Quilts and it is just perfect. It is a small quilt since I only had 104 squares to work with and this design used up 99 of them. Since it was so small I added two borders and it ended up 40 1/2" x 49 1/2" after washing. The skinny border is just red with small polkadots and the bigger is from the DS Quilts line at Joann's. The binding is also from that line.

The back was its own ordeal since I ran out of time to order it and had to settle for what I could find locally, in this case at Joann's. I didn't like anything and finally decided I would get a solid color back so that I could get a 108" fabric and not have to worry about cutting or seaming or anything. It really allows the quilting to stand out, so thankfully it came out pretty much perfectly. Part of me wishes I had done the pieced backing I wanted to, but this was so much easier and I was in a time crunch and in the end, it looks really good.



I did echo quilting roughly 1/2" in on each side of the white squares. I say roughly because I just used the edge of my walking foot as a guide and I am pretty sure that is not an exact distance. It is even though and that is what counts. I really really love this. It is so bright and cheerful and I hope it finds a good home!