April Finish

I've spent several days drowning in paperwork, but I managed to finish my little potholder quilt a couple of days ago. 36 blocks that finish to about 5-3/4" for a quilt that is about 35" square. Very time consuming to hand sew all the blocks together, but well worth the effort. I've made a sleeve for it and stitched out a label, but it's finished! Yay! 

I'd love to make another one of these embroidered potholder quilts, specifically a Rose of Sharon quilt. I have the embroidery designs and the fabric, but I dare not start anything else just now! Some day. 

 

Bon Bon

First, thank you to Grace, Judy, and Julie for your lovely comments on my pineapple quilt. I've had trouble getting Blogger to forward comments to my regular email. After I complained about it one day on the blog, Wanda from Exuberant Color said that Blogger doesn't seem to forward her comments if they source from aol or yahoo. 

Yesterday, I discovered that Blogger actually did forward all the comments from the Pineapple quilt post. One of them landed in my mailbox. The other 4 went right into the Spam mailbox, which never gets anything, so I rarely check it. There they all were. It's always something with Blogger.

Back to Barbara's scrap bag, one of the piles I sorted was neutrals. I further sorted those into tans, creams, white tone on tones, low volume prints, and solids. I had just barely started the Bon Bon quilt when Barbara gave me her scrap bag, and I was using a solid white background so I could use that fabric up. All of the white solids from the scrap bag promptly went into the quilt and have already been used up.

Bon Bon is a free pattern from Fat Quarter Shop. It is a very simple, very quick quilt to make; and it uses a precut called a Jolly Bar, which is exclusive to them. A jolly bar is a stack of rectangles cut 5 x 10"; so depending on the pattern, you could substitute two charm packs or part of a layer cake. I happened to have on hand 4 identical charm packs I found at a good sale at Marden's, so I'm using them in the Bon Bon quilt. 

I had the block components assembled for 16 blocks for a 30-block quilt, and I put the 16 blocks together today. The other 14 block components are cut, and I just have to sit down and sew them. The quilt used most of two charm packs, so I'll have enough to make another quilt to use up the rest. The first quilt is meant to be a charitable donation, the second will go to a girl in the family.
 

Barbara's Scrap Bag

My good friend Barbara has been a quilter for many years. Actually she considers herself more of a crafter than a quilter, and she loves to make purses and bags, outfits for her grandkids, things like that. 

Like any good quilter, Barbara dutifully saved all her scraps for years, thinking that one day she might make a scrap quilt like so many of us do. Even though scrappy quilts have never really been her thing, she finally did try some different projects but was unhappy with her efforts. 

Recently, with destashing in mind, she finally decided to throw in the towel on scraps, and I became the very happy recipient of a kitchen-sized bag of her scraps. Lovely scraps, larger pieces, newer lines, not calicos and such. Her taste in fabrics is not as eclectic as mine, but there is still plenty of variety and appeal. 

I sorted her bag into color groupings as I considered what I might do with them. I finally decided to take a recent note from Bonnie Hunter's blog; and rather than cut them up into squares, rectangles and strips for the scrap bins, I decided to challenge myself to actually use them up in a series of quilts. 

My only rule for the challenge is to make as few quilts as possible out of the scraps. That might be a 3 or 4, or it might be 20, if that's what it takes. I have no timeline in mind, and I may work on them here and there in between other projects, or I may sit down and plug away at one in particular. I'm also allowing myself the latitude of adding my own scraps to the mix to make a quilt the size I want, but I plan to use up Barbara's first if possible. No rules, save the one.

There is a tab at the top of my blog now to list the quilts I'm working on, have finished, or thinking about.The first one is already in the works.