Warm waters

Somewhere in the last couple of days it got to be March! March is the month that winter turns into spring, which makes it a great month.  It tends to be windy and rainy, but I don't even care-- spring is coming! The fact that I have a daughter born in March has absolutely nothing to do with my current affection for this month, I swear.

To ring in the new month, I have finished the warm-colored Regatta quilt! If it's going to be warm, we might as well have warm colors, right?

Aren't those colors happy? If you recall, I had an old Kona solids jelly roll that I wanted to use up, and I separated it into warm colors and cool colors to make two small Regatta quilts.  (The cool-colored Regatta is HERE.)  These will be donations for the Hands to Help Challenge run by Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.  The Challenge hasn't officially started yet, but I know that if I don't do this now I might never do it, and I really wanted to make these to donate. I think they'll keep until it's "officially" time to mail them in.

My Regatta quilts are smaller than the original and use only one of the jelly roll strips per row.  Because my quilt is smaller, I only used three "steps" instead of four.  I spaced these at 10, 14, and 18 inches, which worked out just fine for me.

This little quilt finished at just about 40 by 45, which is a little smaller than I wanted. I really disliked the pinked edges of the strips, so I cut those all off this time.  This made the strips 2-1/4 instead of 2-1/2, which shrunk the quilt by almost 6 inches in length.  It's still a nice size for a child, though.  Maybe a younger child than the other quilt, but I think it will still work out okay. You can see the size difference in this picture:

I also did this one quilt-as-you-go style, which worked out great, and then I used the leftover strips from the jelly roll as binding.  The binding is a little wide, but I'm calling that a design choice. I just didn't feel like trimming the jelly roll strips down. I cut each of the strips in half for the binding so that there is more variation around the quilt edge. Finishing these two little quilts means that there were only 4 strips left from the jelly roll, and I've recycled those into the Monet's Wedding Ring quilt.  This means the roll is gone and mostly used! Hurray!

Because the fronts of these quilts are mostly solids with small prints, I put a fun print on the back of this one:

It's a little bit girly, but there is a lot of pink on the front of the quilt, so that's probably okay.

I really like how this quilt (and it's twin) turned out and I would definitely make them again.  The pattern would also lend itself to a bunch of variations, including making a "chunky" version using wider strips.  In THIS post, Janine used pieced hearts instead of squares in a doll quilt! That would look so cute on a larger quilt.  Wish I had thought of it before I pieced those strips.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.  I have managed to dodge the digging for one more weekend and am having an adventure for a few days.  Can't even tell you how excited I am about it! 

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, crazymomquilts, and Finished or Not Friday.