The idea for this originated with a Guild Christmas Party. We were all handed 25-patch blocks and we proceeded to play a game of Bingo with them. The calls were “birds in red fabric”, “snowflakes on blue fabric”, etc. I didn’t win any games, but I came home with an idea of making a Bingo quilt. I thought it would be fun to play at the beach using seashells as our Bingo markers.

I decided on columns of red, blue, green, yellow and orange for my 25-patch blocks, all from my scraps. It was taking a long time and I was running out of scraps of the right colour but with different patterns. When I had grandkids here over the summer I had enough blocks that we were able to play a “trial game”. The trial failed miserably and I set it all aside.

When an opportunity arose to try my hand with a long-arm quilting machine I quickly put together enough blocks, in no particular order or colour, for a fast finish. It took about three hours to quilt on the long-arm and setting up the machine took at least an hour of that time. Although it was fast to complete the quilting, the long-arm will take as much practice as free-motion quilting on my own machine to get anything that looks good enough to use as either a donation or gift.

This is my first finish of 2018! I’ll throw it in the car for sunny days at the beach but until summer I’ll use it to keep myself warm when we watch TV. It is small enough that I can wrap my legs in it and still be able to knit.

And who knows – it looks to me like it would make an awesome “I Spy” game.

My Leader and Ender project for 2016 is done and has been passed along to the Guild for Community Quilts. I had to get it out of the house because if I kept it much longer I’d be wanting to keep it for myself. It’s been folded and stored in a bag for that very reason – out of sight, out of mind.

I’m not sure why I like it so much – is it that the scraps I used in the quilt are some of my favourites or maybe it’s because I can remember where almost every scrap came from. It was my own design, based on something I saw online, but I can see a few things that maybe should have been done differently. There are a few nine patches that didn’t show up well with the background – specifically in the top right corner.

It took forever to quilt. I outlined all the nine patches and then did a free-motion flower in the background squares. The final border was quilted with a meandering pattern – my go-to design! I don’t know why I went to all that trouble (except it was good practice) because the quilting doesn’t show up on either the front or the back.

I used my own backing for this – I loved the top and none of the backings we had for Community Quilts really worked with it. I used a multi-coloured binding, most of which was left from other projects I’ve bound.

The Guild did a demo one evening on how to make these cases. Anything with a zipper is a challenge for me and I can’t say the second one was any easier than the first!

At the time of the demo I thought Will might be able to use a case for his sunglasses because he wears contacts now. When I decided on gift cards for Alex and Will I made a second one (Mickey Mouse for Alex) and stuck their gift cards inside.