A Long While

I've been gone a long while from my blog, and how annoying to discover Google search links automatically appearing in my post!! Took me a while to figure out how to get rid of that unwanted feature. I suspect that is more for Google's benefit than mine! 

This year has gone by in a flash. At the beginning of July, I realized half a year had elapsed, and now here we are almost into September. The most momentous thing that happened this year is that my younger son got married earlier this month--his first marriage and her second. We welcomed his bride and her two children to our family, ages 14 and 7. 

I spent much of the earlier part of this year doing my work for the Maine Quilts show, which happened at the end of July. I have worked for quilt show now for nine years, and I'm thinking next year might be my last. I'm not getting any younger, and I really would like to spend more time with my family at camp during the summer months. A real vacation might be a nice idea too.

I really haven't gotten much quilting done this year, which is a crying shame because I have so much beautiful fabric. There's another good reason to give up my activities with Maine Quilts. The neutral strings quilt, which I called Cafe au Lait, from my last post was finished. 

I like this quilt so much, and I'd love to make another one, maybe in diamonds, especially since the bag of strings I was working from doesn't look like it was touched. An altogether too common story. 

I pieced the backing in an effort to use up some tans I no longer wanted. 

And I quilted it with a pantograph called Malochite, which was interesting and fun to do.

In April my quilt group held a charity sew day, and we made this pattern called Iceberg from Villa Rosa Designs. Precut friendly, makes a great lap size, and it's easy to sew. 

I quilted it with a pantograph called Knit 1 Purl 2, which I hadn't tried before. I liked the way it looked, but I wish I could have kept those lines a little more even.  

I got two more quilts finished in July. One was a UFO that was several years old, Bitcoin, a Bonnie Hunter design. Another quilt that will be a favorite of mine. And, in an altogether too common story, the strip bin doesn't look like I touched it, even though there are 3,330 rectangles in the quilt. I may have also, ahem, cut more fabric as I went along making the quilt. 

And I used everything in this quilt, civil war repros, batiks, calicos, modern fabrics, florals, novelties, kids prints, you name it. And some of them are really old, like from decades ago. It all went together so well.  

This was, as Diane Harris from Stash Bandit likes to say, a ridiculous amount of fun. I had a ball picking out each set of matching rectangles to sew together and moving them around on the design wall. The rectangles finished to 1 x 2, and I am working on another Bitcoin with slighter wider rectangles. There might also be another one in my future with bigger rectangles.    

My other finish in July was this quilt called From Our House, a free pattern from Riley Blake Designs. I used the same fabrics from Riley Blake that were used in the pattern because I liked the colors so much, and I liked the look of a textured solid-like fabric. This is more  modern for me, which is something I'm gravitating towards more and more. It would probably be more accurate to say modern traditional. 

I had a friend quilt it because I was running out of time before quilt show, and I love how it turned out. The pantograph is called Bayside, I think.  

 

The Phoebe Quilt

We had another round of snow last night, another 6 inches or so, and just a few days after the last round. Because the temps have been so cold, nothing has melted; so we probably have a foot of snow on the ground now. Too bad it came so late in the winter before the ground froze because without that insulating layer of snow, we think the line coming off our septic tank at camp froze and split. Water ran down the hill under the sheds and froze, so the entire shed is now sitting on ice. Nothing to do about it now, but no idea what that will look like in the spring, but we'll get it fixed. More snow next week. Oh good. 

These are my sedums in the header photo, which we never cut down in the fall. I love how they look with the snow piled on top.

I spent all morning watching James Bond movies and finishing the Phoebe quilt. It finishes at 60 x 80. I intended to donate it; but hubby liked it, and I thought he wanted to keep it--until he saw a four patch quilt I started with the scraps from this one. Look! Over there! So easily distracted, lol. So this one will in fact go to Maine Veterans.

There isn't much blue in the quilt, so I used up another piece of blue fabric languishing in the stash for the binding. I also didn't have thread to match, so I used a variegated thread with that color blue in it, and I quite like the way that looks. Never occurred to me to do that before, but I'll definitely be using more variegated thread for bindings in the future. 

The backing fabrics were maybe 3-yard pieces that I've been wanting to think of a way to use for a long time. Truthfully, I don't know why they appealed to me. Maybe because they were a good buy at Mardens, lol. In any case, the middle piece is now out of the stash. More and more I'm liking the strip pieced backings on scrap quilts, an idea from Bonnie Hunter's blog. Great way to use up some stash.

This neutral strings quilt is the next one to get prepped for the longarm. When my friend passed away in 2017, I inherited 48 of these 4-inch string units.  

I had no idea what her plan was for these, and I didn't know what to do with them either because they're very busy. I finally decided to just sew them all together, and I really like the result. These are made of those low volume prints that are too busy for a low volume quilt, but they're perfect for this. 

The blocks came with a huge bag of strings in these mostly tan colors. Koleen loved those colors, but I much prefer whites and creams, so it took that much longer to figure out what to do with them. I needed another 72 units to bring the quilt up to the size I wanted, so I worked out of her bag of strings, and they blend well. That bag is so stuffed with strings that you'd never know I took anything out of it, lol, isn't that the way? The quilt is now 40 x 48, which will fit on the wall in my bedroom perfectly. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!

First Finish for 2025

We had about four inches of snow the other day, the biggest storm we've had this winter, I think. Florida has had more snow this year than Maine, lol. Bad news for skiers and snowmobilers, but I'm glad about it. The cold is the bigger story--single digits and teens during the days and below zero a few nights this week.

This is a plain and simple little quilt called 'Allure', a 3-yard quilt design from one of Fabric Cafe's books. I finished the top last year and never got it quilted. Too plain maybe, but I wanted to use up these fabrics. I have another cut out, same white and blue, different floral print; both of which will be donated. 

I used a pastel variegated thread to quilt it, which made it a wee bit more interesting. 

This is the next top to get loaded for quilting soon as I put a backing together; I finished this top last year too, and I'm just getting caught up with some machine quilting. This is the 'Phoebe' pattern from kitchentablequilting.com, but I set my blocks together in a completely different way. This is a larger quilt than 'Allure', so I plan to donate this one to the Veterans Home in Augusta.

 

This is what the original 'Phoebe' pattern looks like. Maybe I'll make this layout another time.

 

Happy New Year

 I have been away from my blog...and blogging...for a long time, but I'm still alive and well. After mid-March, life got very busy, and I was already spending too much time on the computer. Still do, lol. My only New Year's resolution? Get back to blogging! Everything else will take care of itself!

The photo in the header is the last picture I took at camp before we shut it down for the winter. I know it's out of season, but I like the photo, so I'm putting it up for a little while.

I finished 12 quilts in 2024, some of which I blogged about in March or earlier. Most of them were either donated or gifted. This one, 'The Lady' was a pattern from Villa Rosa Designs that our quilt chapter used in a charity workshop. I thought my granddaughter would like it, so I gifted it to her and made a different charity quilt instead.

'Cabana' was the next charity quilt, which was donated to an organization here in Maine that assists trafficked women in our state. 'Cabana' was a free pattern from Fat Quarter Shop and utilized one of their jolly bar precuts. A jolly bar measures 5" x 10", so it's like having two charm packs. This quilt was 62" square, so two charm packs... and a lot of background, make a decent sized lap quilt 

My 'Scrappy Spools' quilt was a pattern from Lori Holt and was the challenge for the chapter membership year that ended in August. Mine is a couple of rows smaller than the original because I wanted it to fit on one of the walls in my sewing room.

It rarely occurs to me to use a scrappy binding, even though I see photos of them all the time; but I did use it on this quilt, and I plan to do more scrappy bindings. I also plan to do more scrappy backings.

I love the little picture blocks Lori Holt does, so when Fat Quarter Shop announced another Vintage Christmas Quilt Along for 2025, I decided to dig out my book and fabric and start anew making those blocks. Their quilt along runs for a year, but I hope to get mine done sooner than that and move on to Farm Girl Vintage 2. I have about 8 blocks made at the moment.

'Kylie's Kites' was made with a couple of charm packs I wanted to use up in a November workshop with my quilt chapter. There were some striped charms, which I thought were somewhat distracting; so my solution was to add more stripes, lol. I thought the striped fabric in the border made the quilt. 

This was a pattern from Eleanor Burns, Quilt in a Day. I made this quilt in two weeks, which was a record for me, lol. 

The method used to create the kite pieces in the quilt above generated scraps, so I used the waste triangles to create these diamond blocks. I haven't decided what to do for a border yet, so it remains unquilted.

I put the half rectangle units together like a four patch and then twirled all the seams on the back, so it lies pretty flat. 

'Unicorn Love' was the last quilt I finished this year, and I finished it exactly one week before Christmas for my granddaughter. This was a kit exclusive to Shabby Fabrics, and there was a storage organizer and a pillowcase you could make to go with it. I forgot to get a picture of the quilt I made before I gifted it, so this photo is the cover quilt on the pattern. This was pretty quick to make, thankfully, since I was under the gun for time. 

I bought a ridiculous amount of fabric in 2024, mostly kits and fat quarter bundles; so even though I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, I am resolving to use up lots of fabric in 2025. 

Happy New Year!

The Color Purple

I was all over the place last month... and I still am, lol, but at least I'm being productive. 

The color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this month is purple, so I am making 3" hourglass units ....

 

..... to make these blocks.....

.... for this quilt, which is Bonnie Hunter's Hourglass Leader and Ender Challenge from 2016, and which you can find here. The purples are the outermost border, and I need 200 units to make 50 blocks. Lots of cutting, lots of sewing, lots of scraps. 

When the RSC rotation for pinks, limey greens, and aquas are selected, I'll be working on those rounds. The neutrals can come whenever. In the meantime, the center two blocks, which are orange, are assembled. This is so fun!
 

All Over the Place

I have been all over the place in the sewing room this month because there are so many projects I want to work on that I just can't get focused. I keep taking things out of the closet and putting them back, knowing full well I should work on just one or two projects at a time. Not necessarily a bad problem to have, but not as much is getting done as I'd like! 

I did get the Winter Garden top finished by the end of January. I had planned to set the blocks 4 x 5; but as I was getting ready to start the bottom row, it dawned on me that it would be too long to hang on the wall, so I left it at 4 x 4. It still needs to get quilted. I do love this series.

I thought quite a while about what, if anything, I wanted to do for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I've made two rainbow quilts, and making the same block every month again this year didn't appeal. And I especially don't want to make string blocks. Chantal had a better idea in her first post in January , which was to choose a quilt each month, maybe one already in progress, and tag it with the color of the month and work on that. 

Last year in January, I had a similar plan, which was to start with a new quilt every month using the color of the month. I got so frustrated sorting through tons of scraps to find the colors I wanted that I abandoned that idea by February. I spent the rest of the year sorting scraps into bins, mostly by color. I wrote a post about that process here. I have one very large carton to finish going through, but I've sorted enough to have scraps at hand to work with. 

The RSC color of the month for January was green. I didn't have a green project in the works yet, so I started making these Tilted Nine Patch blocks by Missouri Star Quilt Co from a tutorial on their YouTube channel. The blocks finish at 10 inches, and I did get 10 blocks finished by the end of the month. I plan to set the blocks 5 x 6, so there is more work to be done, whenever. 

I'm also using up bunches of muslin scraps for the backgrounds, so win-win. There are some different shades of the muslin, which doesn't bother me, it's a scrap quilt.

The blocks may not be done yet, but green scraps got used. This large storage bag was stuffed when I started making blocks, and I've emptied more than half the bag. Some of the scraps got sorted or cut into squares and strips and put away; the rest were used in the blocks. Yay!

While I was rummaging around in the greens, I came across this unusual print. I've have gotten scraps from a variety of places over the years, and I missed this one. I think it's ugly in an appealing way, lol, so I intend to chop it up and use it in one of Bonnie Hunter's scrap quilts I'm working on. 

Red is the color for February, so I dug out my Talkin' Turkey blocks, a two-color quilt from Bonnie Hunter's 'String Fling' book. It's been in progress for years; and near as I can tell, I had already made all the units to build these blocks, just have to put them together. I need 30 blocks for the quilt, and I have 20 blocks done.

I think I have most of the border units finished too. What I still need to make are these strip units that also go in the border, and that is what I'll be doing with red scraps the rest of this month. 

For today, I am working on some QOV blocks, two sets of five. My local quilt shop became an official QOV chapter 9 or 10 months ago, and I became aware of it and started participating in December, I think. This is one of two blocks I am working on for February.

The shop is using Eleanor Burns' book, Victory Quilts, and making two blocks a month. The selection of blocks in Eleanor's book all finish at 12", and they're not difficult to make, so a sampler would go together pretty quickly. Last month I made two sets of these blocks.

Last Finish for January

You've probably heard of the Disappearing Four Patch? This is my Disappearing Sampler. This was from an online class in November, taught by Brita Nelson, the Questioning Quilter. She has a channel on YouTube where she teaches some Disappearing patterns, and I've been following her for a while. 

I thought her class would be fun, and it was, but also very stressful, which was my own fault because I hadn't prepared properly. She had us cut fabric ahead of the class AND sew up the starting blocks, like the four-patches and the churn dashes. None of which I did because I wasn't paying attention.

In the class, she directed us to cut up the blocks we sewed and shift the parts into different positions to create new blocks. I tell you, I was cutting and sewing furiously--I never made so many blocks so fast, lol, but it all worked out in the end.  

Originally I had planned to just watch the class and decided at the last minute to actually sew. So I grabbed the fabric closest to me and used it. Not a fabulous choice, but it served its purpose. Going forward, it will be a good reference for some other disappearing quilts I'd like to try.  

I finished the quilting the other day with a pantograph called Spinner. I hadn't used it before, but I do like the texture it created.