Squares--so many squares!

In the six or so months during which I wasn't blogging, I was dealing with a large influx of legacy stash donations to Community First! Village (its Art House, from which we got thousands of yards of overflow that couldn't be stored or used there) and also directly to Community First! Quilters. Along with the yardage and FQs and scraps left over from garment making, came really crappily-cut (air quote) six-inch (close air quote) squares, hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of them.

There were several multiples, so I started sorting and matching and grouping things together with an eye toward making simple quilts. The subject matter varied wildly, but it was a fun challenge. With the extra fabric thrust upon us I could flesh out the groups of squares into something that ended up around 59"x79" (5.25" finished in an 11x15 grid).

Yesterday I put the final stitches into one of them:

58" x 78"

The back was created from a big hunk of sparkly brown in my stash that I wanted to see the end of, and several more of the endless BOM pieces (anything blue that you see here).

 

The minions were definitely from the 6" squares donation. I'm fairly certain the brown came from donated yardage. I honestly can't remember where the two yellows and other blues came from--squares or yardage; probably an equal mix of both.

The quilting was a quick FMQ "daisy" in each block along the diagonal, using appropriately-colored thread. I also used the navy in the bobbin throughout.

I started out using the white in the minion squares, but despite its claim of being for machine quilting, this thread kept snapping and shredding every few inches. I finally pulled it off the machine and replaced it with the light gray, with much happier results. For the binding, I top-stitched it down with this King Tut:

While I was quilting, I noticed this little piece of quirky happenstance, making it look as though the minion had escaped (or was planning to escape) the borders of the fabric squares somehow!

This is ready to be donated to Sleep in Heavenly Peace. I've got 5 quilts ready to be delivered to them, and several flimsies (paired with backings) in my closet waiting to be quilted up. With current temperatures regularly in the 100s, I'm happy to hang onto the finished quilts until the weather gets cooler, giving me a few more months to build up the eventual donation. The daisy-chain FMQ was so easy and fast that I've already pulled the Teddy Bear/Mickey Mouse made-from-squares flimsy for another "quick" finish this coming week.