Charity Quilts for NICU

I hope you’ve all recovered from a weekend of giveaways.  Thank you so much to Sew Mama Sew for hosting giveaway day. Congratulations to Sarah K. for winning my bundle Japanese fabric!

One my big goals for the summer is to make several charity quilts for the neonatal ICU ward where my sister, Sam, works as a nurse.  Most of the infants are born prematurely, and need constant care from the team of capable nurses.  They also occasionally support full term babies that just need a little extra love. Sam tells me that they are a level 3 NICU, so they can handle most issues and can support smaller local hospitals.

Currently, her wing can provide for 42 infants, but the number of patients varies.  I know I can’t help medically, but I hope that some bright and cheery quilts will make the experience just a little bit better for both the nurses and families.

My first quilt was made using leftover solids.  I started by cutting them into squares, then HSTs and before I knew it a little quilt was all put together!

I’ve been debating backing fabrics, but thanks to the support of the IG community, I’m leaning toward this fun Japanese robot print for the backing.

Sam tells me that they have blankets and quilts as small as 20″ wide and as big as lap quilts.  I think this will be a great project for using scraps and orphan blocks.  In an effort to get my scraps organized, I started cutting up all of my warm fabrics into 5″ and 10″ squares.  I figure this will make it easy to use patterns that are written for charm packs and layer cakes.

The leftover pieces that were too small to cut into squares were used to make a 1 hour basket (without handles) to hold all the remaining scraps!

My goal is to get all of my cool and neutral colors organized in the next few days, too.

I’m not much of a scrap quilter so this is a bit out of my comfort zone.  Do you have any go-to scrap patterns? Any great designs that would work for small baby quilts?  Let me know in the comments!