I wanted to prepare some quilts for a local charity auction that they do every year. The proceeds go to help out sick children in our town who need physical therapy.

It has a name and it is

Gwiazdobranie and Dawanie.

No, I do not think things such as handwork like quilts get the money that they should, but I know that the organizers like to have a couple of quilts in the auction as they said people are in awe of them. I didn’t do anything last year as I was so tired from doing all the Ukraine stuff that I had to gently refuse. I had nothing left to give (emotionally/physically).

Now I have had two ideas that I haven’t managed to finish this year- but I decided that this one I could finish in the next few days.

So, I worked on this red and white checkerboard. I’m going to do simple straight line quilting on my Janome because it is easier to straight line quilt on a domestic than on my long-arm. I want to quilt right down the middle of each square. Yes, that will be a lot of quilting, but I think it will look very nice.

I only made this as large as a typical single size here in Poland - so about 60”x80”.

I do hope to make a matching throw pillow with extra pieces I made, because as usual, I made too many strips.

Since most people here in Poland don’t understand patchwork quilting, they will think that I made each square individually instead of doing it as I did it - which is with strip piecing. (And that’s okay!)

For those of you who might be reading this for the first time, I do make a quilt like this by making 16 patches - meaning I first sewed strips of two together - a red/white combo. Then I did that again. And again. And again.

I pressed to the red. Then I sewed those together so I had a strip of 4 - consisting of red/white/red/white.

After I finished that, I pressed once again and then trimmed off 1.5” strips to create segments that look like this:

Once I made up a bunch of those, I made up 4 patches from those 16 patches.

Then I sewed two of those four patches together to make these.

Finally I sewed two of those together to make a square - a block that was 8x8 or about 8.5” square.

I wanted to make a quilt that was 7x10- so I needed 70 of those 8.5” squares. I spent several (parts of) days - working on these.

Somehow, working on these small squares really does take more time than it seems like it should. But I finally finished the top up on Saturday (I had started on Monday).

Now that particular week I also cleaned up all my flower mess on my back patio and composted the tomato plants and cleaned off the bricks and then setup for fall, among other things. We also had a big dinner planned for Sunday so I spent a lot of time preparing for the meal - trying out several new recipes using pumpkin. Get the idea? This wasn’t the only thing to do this week!

In a few days I hope to show you the final set of quilt and throw pillow. I have to finish these up soon.

I wanted to give the organization two things, but I decided after all the work that this one was to just give them this one quilt, the matching pillow and 2 Christmas ornaments and 2 hearts. Pictures of the other things will be shown in a couple of days.

You can see by these closeups that I did allow some very small amounts of color in with the reds. Not very many, however. Most are red or red/white.

So there you are - hopefully soon you will get to see the finished quilt. I did put a small white border on it so that when I use a scrappy red binding it will show up great. :)

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

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