Fabric Tuesday 7/26/11

Today, my girls (yes, I borrowed them, Christie) finished their placemats.  But first let me share with your their quilts they made with a some help from me and my mom. 

Lauren and Megan are 10 and 9 years old respectively.  They are home schooled, and I offered to do a unit on sewing this summer.  So they came over last week to have their lessons. 

We first started by planning the quilts.  Boy, were they surprised to learn they needed to use math to figure out their design.  They had to do the division and multiplication to figure it out.  They decided on a quilt 36" by 48" as a good size.  So they did the math.  As my batting could be quilted up to 5 inches apart we made them 35" x 45" - close enough.  And they calculated that they would need 63 blocks of fabric.

Then I gave them a box (copy paper size) of fat quarters and asked them to group them by color family and decide colors they would like to use. 

Lauren picked purple and yellow:

Megan picked green and blue.

Without any color theory instruction, Lauren had picked complementary colors and Megan picked analogous colors.  Amazing.  They had to pick a third color family in order to get their 63 squares, however I think they did great!

As they ironed the fqs, I cut squares for them and they would lay them out.  After all were cut, it was time to arrange them as they wanted and label them with masking tape and numbers - so they wouldn't get out of order.  Then we started sewing them.  Since we only had a week, I sewed pairs and then my mom came over and helped do the chain sewing.  We were done in a flash!

Next I taught them about sandwiching and picked out backing material.  We then proceeded to baste the quilts in preparation for tieing them.  The girls then tied their quilts. 

Here they are hard at work tieing their quilts.   Since they were still in the practicing using the machine stage, I went ahead and bound the quilts.  By friday, we had finished the two quilts. 

Later,  I'll share the practice pieces they made almost all by themselves as they mastered the sewing machine.

For more fabric tuesdays stories, go to the Fabric Tuesday by Quilt Story button on my left sidebar and see what others are up to.