NICU red X's quilt

For some reason, even with the gloomy weather, I feel excited going into this long weekend.  The week flew by and I was at Thursday.  That's when it hit me that this Thursday is technically the Friday of the long weekend.  All day I was so energized.

After work, I still had energy, so I took out these red X's.  These were orphan blocks from a quilt sashing that did not work out.  These were to be the cornerstones.  As I said, they didn't work out, so instead, they are getting a second opportunity, this time as blocks in a NICU quilt.

From 4 1/2" squares, came this quilt.  I had some pretty sunflower fabric with a red background, that I thought would work with the red X's.  I added the red border to contain the X's, otherwise they just seemed to float in mid air.  

At about that time, my daughter came down and I asked her to select something for the next two borders.  We both thought the dark brown looked good to bring out the centres of the sunflowers and she chose another reddish border to finish it off.

However, I miscounted how big the quilt would be, so when I got the brown border on and measured for the last border, I realized that the quilt was already big enough for a NICU quilt.

By this time it was just after 7:30 pm and I offered to drive my daughter to work.  When I got back though, I still felt restless with energy.  So I decided, why stop there and proceeded to load the quilt on the longarm.

I just recently purchased this Baptist fan pantograph and thought I would try it for this quilt.  The arcs are spaces 3/4" apart, which is fine for a smaller project like this one, but when I get ready to do a larger quilt, I will enlarge the motif so that the spacing is at least 1" apart.

Now there is the trimming, binding and label left to do, to finish this NICU quilt, with only 14 more to go......lol. It sounds like a lot, but they don't take much time to make.  There are so many, because one day I decided to clean up all my leftover block parts from various previous quilts.  Now all those bits and pieces have I plan.

What's on the agenda today?  Well........today I am aiming to finish all the red alternating blocks of the American, Patchwork & Quilting UFO challenge quilt for April.  From there we will see.......

I have a very large list of stuff I want to get done.  As I have this 4 day long weekend, let's see just how much of it I can get done.  I'll keep you informed.  Wish me luck.