My daughter was in Girl Scouts this year and when it was our tun to lead the meeting, she choose sewing as the badge she wanted to teach. I quickly taught myself how to hand sew, then taught her and off we went to the meeting. I took along my box of 5" scraps that I have been cutting and saving for several years, ( I knew they would come in handy!), needles, thread, my sewing machine and quilts in various stages of completion. Each of the girls choose 4 squares and my daughter and I taught them how to hand sew two pair of them together. Then we sewed a basic 4-patch using my machine for the final seam. The girls did a fantastic job of listening and all of them did really well on sewing the blocks together.
Originally we had planned on donating the finished quilt to an area hospital but it turns out that our troop leader is not going to be able to lead anymore. I contacted everyone and we all agreed that giving her the finished quilt as a thank you and a memory would be a wonderful thing for the girls to do. I squared up all the squares and cut them down to the same size and then started yanking from my stash to see what fabric I should use as sashing. I wanted the blocks to pop so each individual square could be admired. I finally settled on a yellow polka dot and finished it off. I ended up doing a 1 inch qrid for the quilting to make sure that the hand sewn seams wouldn't come apart. All in all, though, it stayed nice and square with almost no puckering. I think they will be very pleased with it.
