"6 elephant march"

Despite the fact that it’s mid May and sunny, I was rather cold after a short after-bedtime-outdoor-photo shoot of the little kindergarten quilts yesterday. They were happily dancing in the cold wind, showing off their soft recycled backings to those passing by on the sidewalk.

The recipe is simple: locate a ziplock bag with 4 1/2” squares. Anything goes, but the more variety in colours, patterns and values, the better.

Stitch them randomly-ish together, 4 rows with 4 squares in each row.

Now locate the softest batting that you have stashed away because it is totally useless for free motion quilting. I had quite a few square meters of different kinds of batting resurfacing during the move, and I have vowed to use them before I purchase more. Also locate those soft recycled sheets you have rescued from the rag bin.

Baste the layers together with safety pins. Basting spray does not work very well with flimsy batting as the layers keep shifting.

Put your walking foot on, pick a fun stitch like the three-stitch-zigzag, and go.

Use scraps of binding or ready-made bias tape. The kids won’t mind, I promise. Normally I would stitch them down all by machine, but I needed some hand work. I didn’t plan it, but here we have almost a rainbow with the yellow, orange, pink, red, purple and blue bindings.

Put the quilts in the washer, dry them, enjoy the soft crinkliness, and hand them over. They can be used to teach colours, words, values, math and, most of all, they can be played with, cuddled with and loved. Not a bad destiny for a ziplock bag of simple squares I'd say.

The origin of the name of the quilts? Nowadays I have to sing one particular song when we are leaving the kindergarten. It’s about elephants and a spider’s web and goes on forever unless little man gets distracted as you just keep adding an elephant for each verse.

Lesson learned: I can use the rest of my hopelessly soft and flimsy polyester batting for cushions; they would be ever so soft and lovely and with the small sizes, the flimsiness of the batting is manageable when pinned properly.

You can see my first (and highly pink) batch of kindergarten quilts here. I am not sure they ever made it to the doll corner though as the staff used them as table toppers.

Thanks for stopping by!