Fleece, Fleece, and More Fleece

So here's the story of how our family came to have a ridiculous amount of fleece.

 My grandmother worked at a coat factory.  They worked with fleece when they were making winter coats.  The scraps were collected in huge bags and discarded.  Well, that just wouldn't do.  Memere decided to save a few bags from the trash.  First of all theses are not just bags, they are BAGS.  I mean they are bigger than 45 gallon trash bags - if that means anything to you.

It does mean something to me because I brought a 45 gallon bag of trash to the dump recently.  It cost $5 to leave that bag at the dump, but I got rid of some junk.

Anyway, apparently Memere wasn't the only worker to have her eyes on the scraps.  Memere remembers being annoyed by another lady who would get to the scrap bags first and take out all of the biggest pieces.  Well, I guess that Memere got to the scrap pile first a few times because she brought something like 4 or 5 of these BAGS home.  It is pretty funny because each bag has the colors of the season and you can see how the colors changed over the years.  The range goes from bright purple, pink, blue and red one season (think 1980's) to dusty blue, green, and greys (from the 1990's).

So when I moved up last summer I decided that I was going to do something about this fleece.  (Before I go on, let me just say that with the projects that we've completed we haven't even put dent in the fleece stash.)  I pulled in my aunts and this winter we made kid sized hats and mittens during our Wednesday night sewing club.

We also put together some baby quilts for the newest generation of our family.  One Sunday afternoon we got together and made two quilts!  We had a deadline that we just weren't going to miss.  The following weekend we were going to see the two babies, so we wanted to be able to present them with their quilts then.  And we did...

The squares are fleece.  We've appliqued the shapes onto the squares.  On the bug quilt we added buttons for interest.  We snipped the seam allowance. 

So after that weekend we looked at each other and noted that there were 4 other babies/little kids in the family.  For two brothers we came up with these:

 I bought a printed fabric with the characters from the Cars 2 movie.  

Again we added buttons for "bling".  

 The baby brother loves giraffes.  So we whipped up this beauty!  

We couldn't resist adding little tails made from embroidery floss.  

Yesterday afternoon we got together again and made two more baby quilts.  Again, we were on a deadline with the baby shower next weekend.  We made another bug quilt.  It was the perfect way to spend my last Sunday in Vermont!

(For pictures of the other quilt check back next Saturday.  I am so excited to give away the other quilt and just don't want to spoil the surprise!)