Thursday, April 30, 2020

OMG for April Done!

Good grief, I almost forgot to do my post for One Monthly Goal! I actually finished my quilt early this month, had it all done by April 22, then forgot about the posting.

To see what others accomplished this month, visit Elm Street Quilts by clicking here.

The Spinning Pinwheels quilt finishes at 36" x 48", just the right size for a charity quilt for the Margaret Murphy Center near my town. It was designed by Nancy Mahoney and appeared in Fons & Porter's "Scrap Quilts" magazine, Fall 2017.

It was fun to put together, easy with paper piecing; but the quilt top did not go together without issue. When I was constructing the very last block, I realized the pattern was off. The block itself went together perfectly, but when I started sewing the blocks into rows, things weren't lining up as they should. I eventually figured out that the pattern in the magazine had been drafted incorrectly. Isn't that just maddening??

No one would probably ever notice it, but the green leg in those skinny stars is slightly shorter than the yellow leg, and the whole star tilts very slightly because of it. The seams where the blocks join each other are all off by 1/4"; but I figured visually it was better to line up the green and yellow legs than the block seams. Darn good thing it was all bias edges because a little easing was required to get it together. Still turned out pretty well, I think.

I quilted it with the Popcorn pantograph from Willow Leaf Studio.



I did work on some other things this month, and that can wait til another post. I also started another scrap quilt, one called Sticks and Stones. One of the gals in my quilt chapter brought one in for show and tell one meeting, and I liked it.

One night a week or so ago when I was too darned tired to do anything else, I sat and sewed 162 two patches together. The 1-1/2" squares were cut out a long time ago, and there are plenty more where those came from.

Then I sewed together 6 sets of two-patch units--those are the stones, added a couple of 1-inch strips on either side--those are the sticks...

... and when I get enough of them together, they will make up the Sticks and Stones quilt, a pattern I found on Annie's Pattern Central.
I love this!

I still need probably another 150 two-patches for a quilt that finishes at 60" x 74"; so it'll be one of those projects that gets worked on here and there.



Friday, April 3, 2020

OMG for April

I figured out why it was that I was unable to leave comments on blogs with the drop down Comment box. I have no idea what settings bloggers use to get that box in the first place; but I now know that if you have third party cookies blocked in your browser settings, that will prevent you from leaving comments. I discovered that was the problem by googling it. It's a verb now, googling. I google everything. Google is your friend.

In my particular case, my son installed an add-on to my browser called Privacy Badger that blocks advertising and cookies as you are touring the web. You know all that advertising you get in the sidebars on Facebook? Gone. You know all the pop up windows you get on other sites? Gone, mostly. It works extremely well, but it can also block things you don't necessarily want to block. Luckily, you can turn off Privacy Badger for a given site. Once I did that, my ability to leave comments was restored. Yay!

After carefully considering several alternatives, I decided I wanted to get the Spinning Pinwheels quilt done this month for my One Monthly Goal. Right now I need to make 9 more sets of these triangular units for my finished blocks.

My goal for April is to finish the blocks and assemble them into a finished quilt. You can see what others have planned for the month of April by clicking here.

I'd still like to try and get Star Crazy quilted this month and get some more work done on the Sashed Tumblers. In the meantime, my quilt pal finally received the first installment of her Farm Girl Vintage 2 BOM. I already have a complete kit that I hadn't started yet, and I told her I'd work on it with her. This month her kit included the first 5 blocks out of a total of 50, I think; so right now we have nearly a full month to get them done.

This is my first one, Cheerful Tulips. Once I get the other four finished, I'm going to start working on the Vintage Christmas blocks, another Lori Holt sampler quilt. I bought the kit for that one last year and got all of the blocks cut out and bagged up but never really got started with the sewing.