Day 72 – Little Hands and Fingers

Today’s design is going to be short, sweet, and no-nonsense because as soon as I finish we’re all headed to the North Carolina Zoo!

And what better stitch to feature on a zoo day than Little Hands and Fingers:

I recently realized how big my little boy’s hands have gotten. It seems like only yesterday he could barely wrap his fingers around my thumb!

Design Family – Edge to Edge. Little Hands is really worked in rows from one edge of your quilting space to the other. Because it’s so free form, however, it will probably still work in all areas of your quilt like stippling.

Difficulty Level – Beginner. This is really very easy, especially because you can extend the fingers to take up more or less space on your quilt as needed.

Directional Texture – Two Directions. When stitched in rows, this design definitely shows up with a horizontal or vertical texture. However, if you stitched this on the edges of your blocks in just one single row it will give off a flat, directionless texture more like stippling.

Suggestions for Use – Here’s my way cool idea: take the hand print of a whole bunch of kids (or one single kid with a long attention span) and applique or paint their hand shapes onto fabric squares.

Put these together with a thin sashing and stitch Little Hands and Fingers all around the edge of the sashing as though the hands are gripping the block.

Sounds cool to me!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day