100's Day

Today is 100's day at the Munchkin's school - 100 days of Kindergarten! WOW!!! It seems like yesterday he was just getting on to the school bus for the first time.

For "homework" we had to do a project of a collection of 100 "something." We decided to do a collection of 100 fingers, with pictures of 10 family members and their 2 hands, including this awesome one of the Munchkin. He then wrote little cards introducing each person and what they like to do "with their 10 fingers." We put it all into a little album with some front and back cover art provided by the Munchkin, and it turned out great. He had fun thinking about what each person likes to do, and then writing up all the cards, although it came right at the time that we were also writing Valentine's so I think he is nursing some writer's cramp right about now. I have not even brought up birthday thank-you cards with him yet - will give him a couple day's break to recover! :-)

While brainstorming ideas for the 100's collections, I had the thought of doing a 100 block table topper using up some of my 2 1/2" fabric square scraps. I did not pose this idea to the Munchkin, because I wanted the project to be more HIM than ME, but I decided I wanted to make 2 of these table toppers anyway - one to give to his teacher as a thank you for 100 great days of school, and the other for the Munchkin as a celebration of his first 100's day.

I thought it was something we could keep with our seasonal decorations and use on the dining room table for a 100's day dinner celebration.

I thought since the Munchkin loves all the colors - and the rainbow - that I would start with 10 each of those 7 colors, and then add in pink, brown and black to complete the set. Only trouble was - I was a few blocks short in a few color families.

Enter my Tran-Quilt-ity friends, who responded to my email plea with lots of squishy little envelopes filled with lots of colorful squares (and a few bigger scraps that I had to trim down myself -but that yielded lots of yummy color goodness!) With the response I got, I could have made a whole set of these, but given other constraints like finding time to get them quilted I stopped myself at 2. I finished this one for school last night before dinner, and quilted up the Munchkin's after he went to bed last night - it is waiting on the dining room table for him to come down this morning.

These doubled as a good practice ground for some FMQ. I still have more practicing to do before I tackle a whole quilt, but I did echo quilting on this one, and a meander of sorts on the other - after doing a "stencil" of the number 100 in the center - not sure if you can see it in the picture.

These were great fun - and I have plans for the leftover donated and collected squares for some charity quilting projects.

Happy 100's Day!