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.

My Dresden buttercup

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 one was challenging, but mostly because as I said before December was a lot.

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

Number thirteen

Well I guess that explains a lot, but it is finished and I think it’s one of the favourite ones I’ve made. As usual I started by pulling fabrics from my stash - and I think all of these have featured before, whether in quilts or other makes. It seems once a piece of fabric has my attention it stays there until it’s mostly used up.

For the centre blocks I used some leftover fabric from the first charity quilt I made, which I’d discovered when I was sorting and rearranging my craft room the other month, and luckily there was just enough for the Dresden part of the blocks.

This was the bit that was doing its best to intimidate me, but actually it was easier than I expected and the instructions I was following were really clear.

It wasn’t long before I had the four centre blocks, looking good hey?

It wasn’t until after I started to add the borders that I decided that I wanted to keep the layout above, and typically one of the blocks had the blue fabric in the opposite corner, but I decided to continue and work with it - whatever it was to be.

Then I had a wobble for the last border on the blue side. The pinker flowery material just didn’t work for me.

I’d remembered that I had the blue dots and buttercup material and I already planned to use that on the back, and it seemed a much better fit. So for a few days I stared at this layout on my craft room floor, before finally deciding it was the way forward. And wasn’t it just as well I did, otherwise this quilt wouldn’t have had a name!

And then December became a lot, shortly followed by Christmas so it wasn’t until the end of the year that I picked this up again.

Before basting this one I added another ‘half’ border in the buttercup material so that there was some balance for my eyes. And that block that had the blue the wrong way round was still the odd one out, but I was happy with where it was.

Once again the quilting was the straight line type - and this time I think they’re pretty straight thanks to the adjustable guide I bought. Not only were they straighter than ever before, they’re also more evenly spaced - and even better it whizzed through my machine. I was (and am) very happy.

So with the binding added it was time to remember one of my lessons from my Quilts of 2025 post and take a more pleasing on the eye photo.

This spot struck me as idea as I was walking downstairs, and even though this quilt would look great on the mustard kitchen sofa I couldn’t wait to try it out. It also gives me a real easy way to photograph the back too!

And if you’re wondering how I got it to stay perfectly balanced on the bannister, there was three very small pieces of parcel tape doing all the work. I even impressed myself with that!

I’ve still to cut out, let alone make my own block for my block of the month quilt so that will follow - and I’ve one more quilt to make as part of this ‘stretch’ project, which I’ve not even started yet either. It’s taken until the November block for me to slow down on this project and monthly block quilt, which isn’t bad going - but there’s still a lot more to do to put together my quilt, but the end is almost in sight!

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.