omak

Every year, we try to provide a day camp at the Post for the area Girl Scouts. This year, we had 45 girls who gathered on Saturday for a day of pocket flag folding (and learning flag etiquette), clipping coupons for military commissaries overseas, making soldier greeting cards, decorating gift bags for Veteran Christmas Gift Shops, a banner created from paper and the girls tracing their hands, decorating the card and writing a greeting to a veteran. The banner is then covered with Contac paper, crocheted together and hung in the Post - - the girls' way of saying "Thank you for your service and allowing us to come to your Post" ... and, sewing quilt blocks together for a quilt.
Pictured below are two lap robes, which will become actually three lap robes because I wasn't paying attention to the length, and they will need to have some blocks removed and added together. The blocks are five inches square to begin with. The quilt needs to be 11 blocks across and 13 blocks down. The two quilts I pictured are actually 18 blocks down, so you can see <g>.
The little pinwheel quilt will be a baby quilt for Operation Stork - - a program that provides a Welcome basket to newborn military babies, all branches of service, in the Spokane area. The pinwheels began life as forty pieces of triangulations for 1 and 3/8" finished HST - - I had copied them off a site that someone from here posted (cannot remember where). My 90 year old quilting partner cut, ironed, and stitched all the pinwheels together, after I had done all the sewing of the triangulations. It was Miss Isobel's idea that I add the plain colored blocks between the pinwheels (good thing, too or we wouldn't have even had a baby quilt!).
Anyway, the girls would pick out 6 to 8 pieces of fabric, sew them together 2x2, take them to the "iron lady" to have them pressed, come back and sew the twosies into foursies, and so on until they had all their chosen fabrics together, at which point, they went to the pool table (covered by plywood and a sheet) to arrange them - - my idea of a quick design wall. I had four machines, four quilters to help the girls, and during lunch and closing events, we joined all the blocks the girls had put together.
Between each set of 5-inch blocks, before the girl went to the "iron lady", we grabbed the pinwheel blocks and used them as a "courtesy block". In this manner, we did not have to cut long lengths of thread, which never seem to make it into the trash <g> ... hope you enjoy the results of our most recent "Girl Scout Day Camp at the Post". <wave>

edit -- the solid color block in the baby quilt is actually a lilac (which under SOME lights looked like a light blue!) ... but, definitely it is NOT the gray that it looks like to me here :?