Rainbow Dugout Quilt, Pink Bowties, and Happy 2025

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

I made a LOT of quilt blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge in 2024.  It might take me all this year to finish them up!  Technically I finished this quilt last weekend, before the New Year.

I was calling these "Stretched Stars" blocks, but it turns out my measurements were off slightly and they didn't really line up to make stars.  (Click HERE for that post.)  They work fine set like this, though.

I got the idea for this arrangement from these books by the late great Mary Ellen Hopkins, quilting pioneer and rotary cutting genius.  The amazing It's Okay If You Sit On My Quilt Book was a groundbreaker in 1982 when it was first published.  The quilting world was changed forever by the invention of the rotary cutter, and Mary Ellen showed us so many ways to use what she called a "whizzywhacker".

If you've never seen these books before, I recommend looking for them in your library or used book store.  There are so many ideas in here.  Mary Ellen's mind must have been going 80 mph all the time.

And those blocks I made last year?  She called them Dugout blocks, because they could be used to make a block called Kansas Dugout.  The books will be inspirational as I finish up the rest of the blocks.

My blocks finish at 4.5 in., and there are 56 of them in the quilt.  I added a striped border and some simple quilting.

The back is this fun dotted print, and I bound with purple.  The quilt will be donated locally.

It's a new Rainbow Scrap Challenge year.  Have you started yet?  January's color of the month is pink.  This year I'm starting my blocks with these bundles of small remnants I'm calling Big Scraps.  The goal is to make some room in the overflowing bushel basket while making this year's blocks.

 

First up:  8 in. finished Bowties.

Check out the dinosaur fabric!  A friend gave it to me.  Do you see the date?  1993!  It's 100% cotton  decent quality fabric, and still useful even after all these years.

January is also Community Baby Shower month here in the Milwaukee area.  I like making flannel quilts for babies, especially when it's so cold outside.  This stack of squares will be a pink and white Trip Around the World.  I've got a few others in the mix as well.

My young grandsons were here all day most of last week while school is out for Christmas break.  We went to the library on Monday, and found this cool igloo, made of old milk jugs.  

They also had fun with the puppet theater before finding fun books to take home.  Germantown Community Library is awesome!

The start of a new year is a great time to reevaluate all sorts of things, including our hobbies.  But I'm not going to make any hard and fast New Year's Resolutions.  I just want to make scraps into quilts for people who need them.  That's the plan!

Have a lovely week, and thanks for reading!

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

I love reading quilt blogs!  Check out these friendly creative bloggers at the following link parties:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge