Village quilts 2 & 3

It’s been a few months since I shared my first village charity quilt, and back in May I wasn’t as on track as I’d wanted to be to meet my ‘one a quarter’ plan, but it’s amazing what a difference a couple of months can make, as here I am with the second and third of this style of quilts - and I still love making them so I think there will be plenty more.

But 2 & 3…

Mum came along to the July Saturday sewing group meeting with me and at that meeting I seemed to steam through topping up my house pile to make another top. I know I need 30 houses for each quilt top, so when I think I’m close and then find out I’m not as close as I thought, I put my foot down.

Anyway at that sewing group meeting I completed the top for the second quilt - and as you’ll notice one of the houses on the second row has a more modern take on the roof shape. It’s an oops, but an acceptable oops in this style of quilt, as well, not all houses look the same anyway do they?

VILLAGE 2 QUILT TOP

I enjoyed piecing this so much that over the next few days I completed the top for my third village quilt.

VILLAGE 3 QUILT TOP

I love how they look so different, but are so clearly the same design. Some fabrics are used in both quilt tops, and some will continue to feature for a quilt or two more I’m sure, while I’ve probably used the last of some in these quilts.

I decided it would be sensible to choose two different backings for these quilts, as it made sense to batch the remaining tasks. This led me to another ‘design decision’. I was keen to use the bluey/grey and white dot fabric with the yellow flowers as a backing for the final time, but if I added two borders I wouldn’t have quite enough. I guestimated that with a single border I could use it as backing, and even better I could use that material on the front too as a border, though I wasn’t quite sure how it would work as previously I’d used the cream border.

There was only one way to find out

So both quilts were basted and quilted, then trimmed ready for binding.

VILLAGE 2 QUILTED

VILLAGE 3 QUILTED

The patterned border makes them look quite different again, doesn’t it?

I like it though, and it’s persuaded me to be bolder with some of these quilts in the future. But discipline meant that I needed to finish these quilts before I’d let myself play with any future colour schemes, and I wanted to include both of these in my donation early in September.

VILLAGE 2 FINISHED

VILLAGE 3 FINISHED

I’m pleased with both of them and love how they’re both the same but also so different - and I hope that they’ll provide a hug to someone that needs one soon.

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets.

My first village quilt

I knew that I wouldn’t be making quite so many charity quilts this year (after all one a month is quite a lot!) but I didn’t think it would take until now for me to finish my first charity quilt of the year. I guess that’s partly down to life, but also not having the defined structure that I had last year with the mystery block of the month.

Earlier in the year I decided to try and use as many scraps as I could for these charity quilts, and this cute ‘village’ pattern by Sherri from A Quilting Life looked like it could be just the thing, as I mentioned when I posted my quilt plans for this year.

And with my tin of scraps I’ve been diligently making little scrappy houses, thoroughly loving the process of matching fabrics together.

I’ve taken the tin of scraps to a few sewing and patchwork group sessions and my houses were starting to accumulate. Which got me to wondering how many houses make a small village.

There was one way to find out, and as I’m a visual person (no surprises there!) I laid them out on top of my last charity quilt to gauge my progress. Well it worked for me!

And it gave me the spur to complete the last five or so I needed to equal(ish) the size of my previous quilts.

It wasn’t long before my village assembled, and acquired additional borders.

While I still love the look and process for straight line quilting, I wanted to try something different for this quilt. Partly because I’m wondering how straight line quilting would work for my larger mystery block of the month quilt, both practically and design-wise, or if something with more curves would be better suited to the mostly log cabin quilt.

But anyway without knowing more about wavy quilting I didn’t feel informed enough to make that decision, so I’ve wavy quilted this village using one of the preset stitches on my machine.

And I quite like how the wavy quilting turned out.

I also love how the scrappy houses have come together to form the perfect little village and I know that this design was the right choice for my charity quilts for this year. Isn’t it cute?

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets.

Stars and spots

I’ve made another quilt as part of my quilting ‘stretch’ project using the block from Sherri at A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month. As I said then I don’t know if I’ll manage to make a quilt a month, but I won’t really know unless I try…

This is my fourteenth charity quilt and the pile continues to grow, since the first nine have were donated to the Mansfield Coordinator of Project Linus UK in September 2025.

Number fourteen

This charity quilt also marks the end of my ‘stretch’ project where I set out to make a quilt for charity a month, so it is a huge milestone and a very big phew from me! I’ll be celebrating that in a separate post soon, and I already know I won’t be quite so rash when setting myself a challenge for the remaining of this year!

But anyway, on to the block which is another scrappy star. I had some fabrics in my ‘already used’ basket that I was keen to use as much of as I could, so that’s where I started. I cut all the central blocks using the same fabrics, and ended up with four very similar piles.

The sewing on this block was relatively easy, and used the stitch and flip method to create the triangle sections of the blocks. The challenge there is to make sure you cut off the correct corner, otherwise it means starting again. It’s definitely worth a check and double check before snipping the corner, and that method has served me well.

With the four central blocks made I wanted to check my fabric choices for the borders. Here I discovered that the dark blue fabric (on the far right below) had a much richer blue on the ‘wrong’ side, so the wrong side became my right side. Many of these fabrics have already appeared in previous quilts; the two blues were previously a sun dress (the lighter blue) of mine and a work shirt of MOH’s (the darker blue). The spotty fabric is the offcuts from the baby quilt I made on the Project Linus sewing day in September 2025, and the teal, grey and yellow spotted design is the only ‘new’ fabric to be used, and that came from a charity destash sale.

Happy with my fabric choices I started to add my borders, liking the dark blue on opposite sides as in the image below.

I thought it needed another border, and the grey zig zag material was the only one that had enough length - just as well it worked well.

In fact I had enough of the grey zig zag fabric (the backing of a former king size duvet cover) that I was able to include some on the back too. I also played with how I quilted this one, as you can see in the photo above I quilted the left hand section horizontally, and at right angles to the quilting across the rest of the quilt.

I like the finish this gave, and it also made it much easier to quilt, so that’s something I should bear in mind going forwards.

And so, just like that, it was finished - well after I’d added the scrappy binding, which also gave me a bit of a headache. I don’t usually use the final border fabric in the binding, but I’d already sewn my scraps for the binding before I added the final border this time round.

I started pinning the binding on and quickly arrived at my first zig zag clash - and it clashed so much, I know my eyes would not have been happy with it, so I pinned that in a way that my eyes could cope with - and I’m quite pleased with how the bottom left corner turned out. I was also lucky that the other zig zag instances also lined up pleasingly - phew!

I hadn’t set out to use three different varieties of spots, and zig zags too - but that’s what I ended up with and it’s worked out just fine, and also provided the inspiration for this quilt’s name.

And what a one to end my ‘stretch’ project with!

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts.