I love making and donating little quilts with dolls, bears, and other stuffed animals and in the last year, Mom has joined me in making the small quilts. When I share them on the blog, I typically get a lot of questions so I decided I’d post some information here for people to refer to.

I also have a post about purchasing dolls/bears/stuffed animals or making bears at this link on my website here.

My tradition of making these quilts goes back years and typically, they’re made from leftover pieces from larger donation quilts as you can see in these next three photos.

In this last set, I cut the initial blocks wrong for the quilt … I wanted my triangle pieces white and the framing triangles blue …so what to do with the “mistakes” ? A little doll quilt was the perfect solution.

The size of my little quilts vary depending on the leftovers I have and the pattern I choose to use for them but they range from about 22 to 30 inches at most. Most of mine are rectangular but some are square.

I love hand quilting so some are big stitch hand quilted, some are quilted on my domestic sewing machine and when I have some extra backing on a quilt on the longarm, some of them get longarm quilted. This gallery has some of the ones I’ve made over the years.

Click on any of the photos to scroll through a slide show with larger pictures.

Last year Mom joined me in making these little quilts for donation but she’ll be the first one to tell you that she doesn’t like having to figure out a pattern for them so she takes leftover pieces of Novelty fabrics from her stash or mine … and frames them with borders. Typically her quilts are about 24 inches square and they usually get 2 or 3 borders depending on how large a square she starts with.

Kathleen asked me how I wrap these dolls/bears up with their little quilts for donation so … here we go.

I lay the quilt with the backing up and place the bear on the quilt.

Fold the quilt up over the bear – if the quilt is larger, I’ll fold part of it under at the top to make it fit.

Fold the left side to the back.

Fold the right side to the back.

Wrap a piece of ribbon around and tie a bow.

This is how your back looks.

And your bear with your little quilt is all ready to donate! Mine go to an organization that works with abused kids but you can look for other places to donate too – foster care, groups that work with sick kids like the Ronald McDonald house, police and sheriff departments, women’s shelters, and anywhere else you think a child might benefit from the comfort of cuddling up with one.