Birthday Blocks Rainbow

One of my 2024 projects for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge has been the weekly Birthday Blocks at Edyta Sitar's Laundry Basket Quilts blog. Each week a new block pattern was posted, and I followed along, making the blocks in the color of the month of the RSC. Half of my blocks were made with a light background and half with dark.

When the RSC got to September and October and moved into neutral colors like black, brown, and light neutrals, I decided to stop making more blocks. I already had 36 blocks made, each finishing at 6", and I knew I'd be able to figure out a way to get a small quilt out of them.

I wanted the quilt to feature the fact that the blocks have two different backgrounds. Unfortunately, that didn't show up as well as expected in my first layout, shown above. The problem was the differing amounts of background fabric in the blocks, especially if the background wasn't at the block's outer edges. My solution was to add a 1" finished frame of background to each block, which really emphasizes the contrast of light vs. dark background fabrics. Here are a few of the blocks after framing.

To further emphasize the light/dark backgrounds, I went with a basic checkerboard layout of the blocks. They have all been joined together into a small quilt top that measures approximately 40" x 56". I expect to finish it off with a binding of the dark background fabric.

LBQ Birthday Blocks

40" x 56"

Be sure to check out all of the wonderful scrappy projects at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge every Saturday and Oh Scrap! over at Quilting is more fun than Housework on Sunday. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA