Finished an all-yellows random cabin squares quilt with a bright modern alphabet also randomly scattered on the yellow background last night, and made a 16-cabin sailing ship (small) usually made with half-square triangles, and set into a 12", more or less block for a multi-ship quilt for young child or seafarin' man, depending, but this one, I had a lot of purple and yellow half squares intended for a 12-block cabin quilt, but only used 6 of them--4 for sails, and 2 for the ship front and back.
I found this quilt lay out online of the usual 16-block layout that usually encompasses 2 rows of sails, a row for the ship, and a row for the ocean. It's always fun to use an ocean fish fabric to represent the row for the ocean or create Greek-frieze block for the square-rolling seas. (go figure!) On this quilt, the 16 blocks in cabin rather than half squares, like the ones below, the sky is just a row of yellow cabin quilt squares to represent the bright buttermilk skies of certain mornings and evening sunrises and sunsets. The sales and ship are squares of purple ship and purple sails. And in order to successfully make a cabin quilt, it's pretty given that a border with as few seams as possible all the way around are greatly helpful into keeping the top straight and true while basting, then quilting the whole thing with as few cupping issues as possible. Cups in any layer can result in an uneven top and a back that is full of totally horrible quilting folds, some of which can reach top and bottom or side to side of the quilt. (akk! To be avoided!!) So that's why I border my cabin quilt, because I'm dealing with people to quilt these cabin quilts who have little to no experience with that little problem, and I try to keep them out of the disaster of having to remove stitches from the entire back, rebaste, and resew, or heaven forbid, toss the whole thing to the bottom of the "to do" stacks in which the quilter dies before the top is quilted. lol
Anyhoo, there are six quilts in the stack because I think I completed at least 3 small tops since the last brag, because my pile has 6 complete infant tops, so that leaves 4 to go, and the little ship quilt that got assembled this morning may be #7 unless I added it to the count when I put last night's completion on the top of the stack.
Anyway, before the third Tuesday this month, I hope to have another 10 tops ready for the ladies to quilt. We may not meet in December due to Christmas, but then, we may, because our chairman likes to get those quilts to the various sources of our giving before Christmas is celebrated, in case one of the recipients at the shelter or home they live in doesn't get any other gifts. You just never know if it's an elderly person in a home, whether anybody even bothers to visit them, or if it's a fatherless child, no way is that kid getting anything from daddy dearest, and single mommie may have to spend all her earnings on heating, food and a roof.
Having seen the above color choices, yellow and purple doesn't seem tooo awful bad....she rationalizes to the moon and back....
So I cut some more mint color for the 4 light areas and of course there were plenty and more than plenty of green squares left to complete the 24 squares, which was done about 20 minutes ago. I also set them with brown sets, and did a one-of-a-kind quilt with a bird fabric I bought a bolt of at wall mart years ago but never got to use. It was a really pretty fabric and had backyard songbirds on them of all kinds, yellow and dark like orioles, but yellow, Eastern bluebirds, a red bird like a tanager and a little sparrow-like dark brown bird. I had to make the borders large enough to encompass the birds which also had fruits around them--like pears, plums, small apples or peaches, etc. The brown material was a modern type of op-art with light and dark brown, and really worked up nice. I was too pleased when done. It's sure nice to finish a quilt like you've never seen before and feel you made an American original quilt top. This one, of course, is # 9 in my little stack of tops going to the charity bees next week, and I'm happy it's done! I put in a lot of hours in that quilt, not counting the hours 3 or 4 years back when I was making all those squares up from 2 1/2" strips cut all the way across which was probably 17 across and with the left overs (only 1 color per square, I had a lot of stacks of dark and medium greens in the tones of leaves you would see in nature. So 2 stacks easily had 200 squares in them. There were no more than 2 repetitions of each color, but some only had no repetitions. Now I can go sing tonight If I want, and I do want to. So it's off to the races! 
