Did you see the pair of pink panthers ?

Normally I would say in the header something along the lines of 'Pink Panther - a finished quilt' but I can't really do that because I finished two Pink Panther quilts !

Number one:

and number two:

So this is what happened. You know when I said in my last post that I had a huge pile of the blocks. Well huge doesn't really cut it. I started laying them out and realised that this was not gonna be a little baby quilt but either a small single or God knows what. So I simple decided to make two baby quilts which would be great for twins !

I can't tell you how much fun I had making these quilts. It was so liberating using all these fabric almost at random and even more so adding from my stash. In actual fact this was my first "foray" into scrap territory which in the past I have studiously avoided because I have never seen the attraction to handle a loat of scrap pieces. I was wrong; this is fun !

I quilted one of the pair in double diagonals and one in double square lines. Each uses a print from Aneela Hoey's very first fabric line 'Sherbet Pips' for the backing. This works perfectly as the collection itself features pink rather liberally.

There are so many pieces in these two quilts that I love. There are the balloons and the dress from 'Children at Play', there is some 'Far Far away' in there and would you believe it some Liberty tana lawn too, lots of strips and dots and little animals, text prints and chevron.....

The quilts are 42" x 36" and can be found under this listing in my Etsy shop. So what do you think are the chances somebody buys them for twin boys...... :-)

Pink Panther - part 1-

Strange things are happening to me. I am the first to admit that I am not fond of pink. I do wear pink on occasion, in fact I have shocking pink tights that I like to wear on particular dreary winter days.
No, the dislike of pink stems mainly from the gender polarization of the colour. When I see toddlers or little girls dressed top to toe in pink I see red (sort of).

When it comes to quilting I use pink sparingly and if I do then it is the shocking kind of pink more that the soft kind but I have quite a bit of pink in every possible shade as I often buy whole collections and most have a couple of pink pieces in there somewhere. I often extract the pink fabrics and put them in my scrap bin. I have done that quite a bit with the jelly role quilts I made over the past year (see here and here) in an attempt to minimize the usage of pink.
Said scrap bin is now somewhat overflowing and over the past weeks I kept eying the pink strips sticking out of it. So one day last week I upended the bin and separated every piece of fabric that had pink in it. When that was done I realized that there was a lot of pink but also a lot of red sneaked into the pile so I did a second separation exercise and ended with a more harmonious pile of scraps.
 

Then I briefly contemplated to transfer it all to the rubbish bin but quickly thought better of it. So I took the scraps and guided but the 2.5 " wide jelly role strips started cutting everything that was in this pile into 6.5 x 2.5 " pieces. Randomly without thinking or planning.

After that there was no stopping me and I dived head first into my stash and pulled almost every single piece of fabric from it that had pink in it together with peach (which is my second least favorite colour) and some text prints and a few contrast prints for good measure.  You know for someone who claims not to like pink I sure have a lot in my stash !

And I kept cutting along some more until I had a few pieces of each of the stash fabrics in addition to the the scrap bin pile I already had. And then I started sewing these together into blocks of three strips each measuring 6.5 x 6.5 ". Again I did this mostly randomly without much planning and thinking and it felt gloriously liberating !

Now I have a humongous pile of blocks on my desk and I have no idea how that happened and I am certain that I can make a lot more than a baby quilt from this..... oh dear strange things are happening to me (and no I am not pregnant, just in case some of you get funny ideas...)