Both patterns are by Bag Lady Creations, the Collegiate Strip Quilt and the kit is from the Fabric Mill in Orem. The BYU quilt on the left was actually finished last December. I made a strip and a patchwork version and let Mark choose which one he wanted for Christmas in 2017. He chose the patchwork, so the strip quilt went in my stash for future gift giving. During the year I decided to make two more and give them for gifts to my siblings for Christmas 2018. You’ll notice that one is not like the other, as one of my brothers has become a die-hard Utah fan.
I used BYU Minky on the backs of the BYU quilts, and Utah Minky on that quilt. It is very soft and cuddly but makes a mess of lint when cutting and sewing. I had the two new ones both quilted at Utah Valley Quilting using their own design of a block BYU with footballs and a block UTAH with footballs. They were very well-received by my family members. My Utah brother said it was the best Christmas gift ever!
I’ve been working on this quilt for a long time, in that I’ve been slowly playing with fabric scraps to construct these “made fabric” squares. They were pieced together randomly from my ‘tiny scrap’ bin and when a section got large enough, I trimmed it into a 6″ finished square. When I had enough constructed, I set them on point using the setting pattern for the 1920’s Farmer’s Wife quilt that my quilt group is working on, and voila! A craaazzzzy quilt. I made a wonky, crazy pieced backing and made a totally random scrappy binding from pieces of leftover binding from other quilts. I quilted it myself on my home machine with a free-style crazy quilting pattern of spirals in the squares and loops in between. It’s totally scrappy and was fun to make. The only problem is that with all those biases, it doesn’t square up perfectly. But this was an experiment and it’s made to be loved and used, so whoever gets it can just use it to death, and it’s OK.
