Kid Art: School Auction Quilts

Last year I made up a quilt and donated it into the school’s PTA fundraising auction. This year, I did it a little differently.

All the kids in both Maeve’s and Liam’s classes made beautiful quilt blocks which I then put into a quilt and finished it up.

Let’s start with the 3rd graders. Their theme was Puget Sound — what lives in it, what surrounds it, playing in it, etc. I prepped white-ish background for them and then each table had a rainbow of solid colored fabrics which had been fused with Steam-a-Seam Lite 2. They cut out their shapes, removed the interfacing paper and then stuck it all together. At home I fused all the pieces, sewed borders on all the blocks and then the blocks into a 80″ x 80″ quilt. Note: I have pictures of the kids making the blocks, seeing the finished project, etc but for obvious reasons those can’t be posted here. I wanted to take the quilt for pictures outside but the day I finished them (which was the same day I had to turn them in) it was pouring so we have spread-out-on-the-family-room-floor-with-bad-light pics. The blurry spot in some of these pictures is the name of the school.

Maeve’s block is the fish one in the center of the picture below. She was so proud of it!

The blocks had fish, birds, seals and sea lions, jelly fish, crabs, sea urchins, orcas (TONS of orcas!), harbor porpoise (or at least I hope that’s what it was because we don’t exactly have dolphins here), lots of seaweed, HUGE waves (fyi: we don’t really have waves, it’s more like a wake from the passing ferries and cargo ships), starfish and some more orcas.

The teachers also got into the action. M’s teacher had a blast with her block! You can also see some of the quilting details here. It wasn’t really practical to applique around all of the shapes, so I pretended I was Angela and quilted them on. And each border got it’s own quilting design to separate them all.

They seriously had a blast making these. I think they could have spent the entire day working on them!

While the third graders had some mad scissor skillz (ha!) the kindy kids aren’t quite there. So for his class we did pixels. Each kid got a blank background and each table got a rainbow of 2″ squares in every color of the rainbow.

Their imaginations are simply amazing. There were waterfalls, faces, dinosaurs (Liam’s!), flowers, picture frames, suns. Other kids had a blast making different patterns with all the colored blocks.

Liam’s block is on the right and his girlfriend’s is on the left. Liam’s is a Plesiosaurus swimming in the water with the sun and clouds in the sky. He got that out of 49 squares… amazing!

And the teacher rocked it with a flower. The kids seemed tickled and humored that he made one too. I had to channel my inner Angela when quilting this one too.

When I took this in, it was fresh out of the washer and had that fresh laundry smell. All the kids sitting next to it for the class picture were touching it and trying to snuggle up with it. Fresh smelling, soft blankets are very comforting when you’re 5!

Eek! A family room full of pixels. #bliss

The quilts sold for a crazy insane amount of money — I’m simply shocked honestly. And I think I’m already signed up to do them next year too. 😉