Bulldozer Quilts for little boys

I had about a yard and a half of a bulldozer fabric I wanted to use up, so one of my July goals was to make some little boy tops that would use it up.  I had liked the framed squares pattern that I used for the second pink/purple/green/floral top, and thought it would be great to put together quickly, so found some tan, brown, and blue and went to work.

The bulldozer fabric needed to be the center squares; if I used it for the outside, it would be in thin enough strips that I felt you would lose the design.  Once I got everything cut and ready to sew, though, I realized my mistake:  I was going to be making four small quilts to use up just 1.5 yards of fabric - the fabric I was trying to use up is at most 25% of the top!  Everything else was coming from my stash so it wasn't a bad thing, but it meant far more sewing than I originally meant for this to involve.

 I found three fabrics to make the outer squares with, all in my stash, and made some of each, then let each kid create a layout.  Neither is anything like what I would have made, but they are interesting nonetheless.  Each is about 40" square:

The first is 6-year-old D's design, and the second was by 9-year-old L.  (Ooo - just realized I need to update my profile, as someone just had a birthday!)

With most of the leftovers, I came up with this:

Then I had to figure out how to use up the rest of the bulldozer fabric, and put together this (another 40" square top):

I'm feeling pretty darn proud of that, combined with what was left of the red bulldozer fabric after it was done and ultimately got thrown away:

Pretty good, huh?

And one of the quilts bundled up with a backing and binding, ready to go for our Linus weekend where it will be tied by Sis:

This has been done for about a month, but now that I'm finally posting about it, I can actually cross it off my July Goals!