School Auction quilts

Here are the quilts I made for our school auction for the last two years. For both quilts, the students each designed a square after viewing the fabrics. My only restriction was that there were limited repeats in the color combinations in the blocks.

In this quilt from the 2009 - 2010 school year, the fabrics are all fruit and vegetable themed. On this one, the students also had to decide on the placement of each of the 6 fabrics around the outside of the square. This made layout extremely difficult since I was determined that no two squares would touch on identical fabric and that similarly colored stars would also be separated.

The quilt for the 2010 - 2011 school year featured fabrics from the Eric Carle collection. Eric Carle is a children's book author and illustrator. His most notable book, in my opinion, is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The pictures in his books are all made up of collages of brightly painted paper most having a finger painted look.

The collection lacked a mostly yellow fabric that I needed to fill out my pallet. I chose a Moda Marbles yellow but it is the only fabric in the quilt that is not Eric Carle.

The design for this quilt is a nine patch alternating with half-square-triangle blocks. As the students began designing their choice of one dark color and one light color blocks, I realized how close we would be to having two of each possible color combinations in the quilt. At that point, I decided to go for it even though it would make it larger than I had originally planned. This also made it the biggest quilt I have ever made for the school auction.

Here's a photo showing the class with the quilt which gives a better idea of the size. I was pleased that the final bid on this quilt at the auction was $1450! That's the most any of my quilts have ever earned for the school.

For this year's school auction in March, I already decided to make a pinwheel quilt that I've made twice before - once for a school raffle MANY years ago and the second as a gift for a young friend.