School Auction - It is QUILTING time again

It is that time of year again. My children's school is preparing for the largest fundraiser of the school year. As I think I have mentioned before, my children attend a very (very, very) small private school. Along with the all of the benefits of a private education, comes the work involved to sustain a privately funded school. A few years ago we started a low country boil and auction. The auction includes a little bit of everything, trips, gift certificates, and household items. I believe that is one reason we have been so successful. The big draw for the parents is the classroom art, in our case QUILTS. The quilts, which include the student's artwork, are put together by parents.

This year the auction will include seven quilts, featuring the art of nearly 70 students! I thought this blog would be a great place to share our ideas! Let me start this post by saying that I am not a quilter, by any means. I am certain that I break every quilt "rule" known to man. No sewing circle would ever have me & I only learned to thread a needle 5 years ago! But we HAVE raised A LOT of money!

Each year our school director chooses a theme...we try to incorporate that theme in our Christmas play, parade floats, fundraising, etc. This years theme is GO GREEN. Great subject, great lesson for the kids, & so many, many ideas! I plan to post pictures of each quilt in progress and the finished projects.

The first quilt, kindergarten & first grade, is entitled "Save the Oceans". It was inspired by a project I found online. I wish I could link up to the owner, but I have no idea where I found this fantastic inspiration:

Which leads me to our version. I am working on the background "water". Sewing the curves has proved to be a little harder than I thought! I found a very user friendly tutorial at http://www.equilters.com/. ( Here is the link http://www.straw.com/equilters/library/techniques/sewing_curves.html) And now our work in process !



The children have made sea creatures, sharks, jellyfish, dolphins, using a glue batik method found at http://www.familyfun.com/ to create their artwork. (Here is the link http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/glue-batik-banner-785331/ ) I'll be sure to post some more pictures when we are finished!

Off to the sewing machine to work on another.....