Bowl Cozy Day

Brrrrr, it was a very cold 16 degrees when I got up this morning, but still no snow in the forecast. Which isn't a bad thing. 

The last several days of the Advent Calendar gifties have consisted of a good mix of notions and project ideas. Along with the Parking sign, there was a small embroidery project. Neither one is really my thing, but my daugher-in-law suggested that a little duck in a charm for a necklace for my granddaughter would probably be well received. A great idea, and I'll wait til next year to make that up. the charm is tiny, about an inch in diameter. 

There was a button jar, to include a little yellow duck button (the company mascot) with directions to make a pincushion top for the jar. Using one of the unused squares from the charm pack from Day 3. 

The next day featured some blue fabric and a pattern for this snowflake pillow, using the buttons in the button jar. 

Yesterday's giftie was a needle threader and needles. Haha, they should have got someone to make a needle threader with a duck. 

Today's giftie is a stashbuilding yard of white on white fabric and a couple spools of cotton thread. 

Personally speaking, I may not use everything in the Missouri Star Advent Calendar box, but whoever put this together put a lot of thought into choosing useful items and fun projects. I have already decided to do this again next year. 

I haven't made quite as much progress as I had hoped on my current projects, but I am moving forward. Wiggle Time Oceana is on the frame, and I've made several passes. The Riptide pantograph seemed like a good choice for a quilt that reminds me of ocean waves and uses some ocean-themed fabrics. 

 

The Cozy Cup mini top plus one mug rug is complete. I still have to add the side borders to the other two mug rugs. 

Whoever designed this quilt did an odd thing with the sashing between the rows. The directions had you add a narrow 1/2" strip to the top and bottom of each cup and snowflake. After I had the top together, I realized it would have been easier, faster and less wasteful to omit the strips on the top and bottom of the cups and just use a wider piece for the sashing. No idea what they were thinking. This would make a great giftie for someone, so it's likely I'll make another; and I'll make the adjustment for the sashing. 

Before I can get these items quilted up, I need to finish the quilt on the frame and get some bowl cozies made. 

Anything that is not quilting is what I call utility sewing, and mostly I don't like to do it. Only occasionally will I make household items like curtains, a tote bag, or anything like that. I did, however, offer to make 4 small and 4 large bowl cozies for my kids, to use up a LOT of yardage of vegetable fabric I acquired at a very cheap price. Why so much? Because I thought I might use it for adult cover ups (bibs), only my quilt chapter never worked on that again as a group project.

So naturally I'm going to use every shortcut I can come up with to make this kind of sewing as painless as possible, so I bought precut bowl cozy batting from Gypsy Quilter. Turns out Creative Grids got together with Gypsy Quilter and made a set of 2 bowl cozy templates which are the same size as Gypsy Quilters batting, which will make it faster to cut out the fabric and more batting. Brilliant!

I made a set of two bowl cozies long enough ago that I forgot some of the little improvements I made to the method, which I remembered after I had most of the first one together last night. 

As I was getting ready to topstitch the outside of it, I realized I had no idea whether my thread was all cotton or a cotton/poly blend, which could be flammable in the microwave. I still have some of the Coats & Clark blends that I am using up, so it very well could have been one of those. So I wound up taking it all back apart, ripping the thread out of the one half, and today I'll put it all back together with the proper thread. I can also include some of those method improvements too.

One side of my bowl cozies is yellow onions, and the other side is red bell peppers. Once I get the first one together, I figure I can put three more together assembly line fashion, to limit how many times I have to change the thread colors. 

A Top and Another New Project

I didn't expect for it to take all afternoon and most of the evening to get the Wiggle Time top together, but it's done. It measures 60" x 74", which will be just right. This evening I found a piece of flannel in my stash to go on the back, and tomorrow I'll try to get this loaded on the longarm sometime in between running errands.  

This pattern was fun, fast and easy to make; and I'll be using it again, probably more than once. The other thing I really liked about it is that there are no seams to match except for the block seams when you're joining the rows--four in each row. Easy peasy!

Advent Calendar Day 3 - today's giftie was a pattern for a mini quilt and a half yard of fabric. Surprise, it's the project directions for the charm pack I opened yesterday, and the red is for the binding for the mini quilt and three mug rugs.  

 

 

 

 

 

I decided to get started on this project right away. Except for the handles, the six cups are made, four for the quilt plus two mug rugs.

I like these colors a lot. It's a departure from the typical Christmas reds and greens and seems to be the fashion more and more these days. And they're not really Christmas-y, so I could use the quilt and mug rugs all winter. 

The charm pack, like most precuts, had pinked edges; and you know what a mess it makes when you take them apart. I have a new tool for cleaning up the mess! It's a desktop mini vacuum made by Odistar. I LOVE this thing! The picture is a little blurry, but it's a handheld device with brushes underneath and some suction. It is perfect for vacuuming up all those tiny bits on the cutting table that otherwise might wind up all over the floor. You can also use it to vacuum up the dust on your keyboard; and it occurred to me it will be perfect to vacuum up all the dust that comes out of a new puzzle box. I'm sure I'll think of some other uses.

This is what the underside looks like. It comes apart easily to empty the contents of the vacuum and to clean the filters.

These things come in seven different colors; and there are two models, one that uses batteries and one that comes with a USB charger. I got the ones with the charger for just $12.98. I thought these would make great stocking stuffers, so I bought four of them. 

I checked Amazon today, and they've  gone up in price by a couple of bucks since I bought mine. I've noticed that the prices on Amazon fluctuate all the time for the same item; so if you're interested, I'd keep checking back to see if the price comes back down. 

Two Easy Finishes

We had another surprisingly warm day here in Maine, as it seems to be all up and down the East Coast. We were in a drought all summer but had so much rain this fall that the drought was overcome. Now the lawns look the best they've looked all year--just in time for some very frosty weather next week. 

The Christmas cactus is beginning to bloom. This crazy plant usually starts blooming before Thanksgiving and often continues to bloom until February or March. My granddaughter has broken segments off of it, I forget to water it half the time, and I don't know how many times it's been knocked off onto the floor. Yet it continues to reward me with beautiful blossoms every year. My summer cactus thrives equally well with the abuse I heap on it--had a ton of lovely white blossoms this past summer.  

I finished the Scrappy Mini yesterday. I didn't do the best job adding the borders, probably because I deviated from my usual method of border application and followed the paper pieced method from the book instead. Disappointing, but I wasn't about to take it apart a fourth time. 

Instead, I decided to try washing and blocking the quilt, which proved to be effective, as the borders are now straight enough to suit me. A small amount of bleeding occurred around two of the red strips however, but it's just for me and will hang in a dark hallway, so I decided to leave well enough alone. 

I finished the Construction Zone quilt this afternoon. This small quilt is going to a little boy in the family and will probably see some hard use, so I bound it all by machine. I find it difficult working with black fabric, and I had an awful time seeing the stitching for the binding, but I liked the black binding.
 

I quilted it with a design called Hot Rod by Lorien Quilting. Quick and easy, which I needed because I haven't been on my longarm for months. 

My next project is on the worktable. Scary Faces is a pattern for a small quilt included in my Spooky Box, an October special  from Fat Quarter Shop. The Spooky Box is like Quilty Box, a box full of surprises that comes once a month. I was always tempted to try that but never did. 

This year I decided to give the surprise box a try, and I wasn't disappointed. Besides the pattern, there was a small bundle of fabrics to make the quilt, and some different notions. One of the notions was a thread conditioner called The Thread Potion in a lip balm tube. I coat my thread with beeswax before hand sewing, but the beeswax cake tends to crumble after a while as the thread slices into it. Thread Potion is softer, and I was impressed with how well it worked--no tangling, no fraying, and no breakage. I would purchase this again, but I'm not sure if it was a one-time special for the Spooky Box since I can't seem to find it now on their website. 

So far I've made the four pumpkin blocks, but only this one has the stem and leaf added. And I've made 1 of 8 chain blocks. Haven't done any of the ghost blocks yet. The fabrics are adorable--spiderwebs, skeletons, bats, Halloween words, and some plaids and dots.

The millenium charm quilt is also back in play. I finished piecing all of the triangles, 1998 of them, last August. I couldn't figure out what to do for a border, so I waited for an idea to percolate. I thought it would look unfinished with just binding, so I decided to add a narrow inner border, maybe 1/2" to 3/4".

Next I wanted to add a neutral border, but it added nothing to the quilt, in fact it washed it out. A 1-1/2" border in a brighter off-white tone on tone fabric with a wider brown outer border improved the look, but the white looked too plain.

Yesterday I found this multicolored confetti print in my stash and decided that would do the trick. My quilt consultant (hubby) enthusiastically concurred, so that's what it's going to be. 

On the back of the quilt, I plan to add the last two triangles to make 2000, plus 22 more, one for each year past the millenium. I'll continue to add one every year in January--until I can't, lol.

Fall Has Arrived

I took pictures for a blog post, and then kept putting it off until....four months later! Why? Well, my work for quilt show kept me busy straight through the end of July. Two days after quilt show ended, I tested positive for covid. I managed to outrun it for two and a half years, and it finally caught up with me. I counted my blessings that it wasn't even as bad as my worst cold. Hubby is still a covid virgin, hasn't contracted it yet.

In September I had the second of two planned surgeries this year and am still recovering from that. All of my health issues have now been resolved, and I got a clean bill of health from my PCP earlier this week. Yay!

My activities have been very restricted since the most recent surgery, so my recovery therapy was this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I built a few puzzles decades ago but started building again a couple of years ago. My recovery therapy after the January surgery was a 4000-piece world map puzzle. Loved it. 

So this puzzle was a thousand pieces, and the dimensions listed on the box are 425mm x 300mm, which works out to be around 16" x 11". The pieces are about the size of a dime. 

 

I did manage to get the whole puzzle together but forgot to take a picture of it. The landscape wasn't difficult; but the sky, which looks to be about half the puzzle, was very challenging. Naughty words were uttered. 

Sitting at the sewing machine was also an allowed recovery activity. I made a bunch of single blocks from new projects I wanted to try out; and I finished some tops, some quite old, that went into an ever growing pile of quilts to be quilted. Nothing actually finished though. 

Tis the Season, a BOM from Missouri Star Quilt Co, was one of the tops that got finished just a few weeks ago. I loved the colors when I saw it, and the blocks were not difficult to piece. This one went into the RTQ pile. 

This quilt, called Scrappy Mini from 'Paper Pieced Mini Quilts' by Wendy Voster, was a project I started this past summer to use up a few scraps. I  added the borders last night and batted it up for quilting. This little quilt will measure about 9-1/2" square when finished. 

I finished this quilt top last week. I went on a bus trip with my quilt chapter a couple of weeks ago and was introduced to the concept of a 3-yard quilt. This was one of two 3-yard bundles I bought at one of the quilt shops, along with a couple of pattern booklets. I liked this pattern because it reminded me of the BQ quilt series from Maple Island Quilts. 

3-yard quilts is a concept developed by Donna Robertson from Fabric Cafe. She has a number of booklets with patterns that are quick to make. This one is not going into the RTQ pile--I hope to get it loaded this weekend and get it quilted for a little boy in the family.

One note about these 3-yard quilts. They are based on fabric that is 44" wide. I prewashed the fabrics in this bundle and wound up short. There was supposed to be another row, but I just didn't have enough fabric. So either don't prewash or buy extra.

Over the summer, I started hearing about temperature quilts. Evidently the idea has been out there for several years. After a little research, I thought it was an interesting idea for a quilt and decided to give it a try.

The inspiration for my design was a pattern called "Temperature Quilt" from Canuck Quilter Designs. Her quilt uses rectangular blocks, but they undulate in regular waves across the width of the quilt. It was more interesting to me to place the colored squares within the block based on whether the daytime temperature went up or down from the previous day. If the colored squares remain in the center of the block, then the daytime temp did not deviate from the day before. I like the unpredictability of this approach. Maybe it's going to look like a hot mess, lol. but I like it. 

I also liked the simplicity of this design, and I knew it was something I could stick with every day for a year. We're talking 3 or 4 pieces in a block, so that's quick to sew every morning. I had no idea about yardage requirements, so I decided to use solids that I know I can reorder if I run out of a particular color. Plus the quilt looks modern to me, and I like that too.

I'm using 12 warm colors and 11 cool colors for my quilt. Each color represents a 4-degree temperature spread. After working on the first three months, I recognized that there are three or four sets of colors that are too close in value. Moving the colors up, down, or middle helps to make the temperature changes more visual. I'm debating whether to start another one sometime next year for a different location, and I would look at changing up either the colors, the temperature spread for each color, or both. 

I started my temperature quilt on August 1, and the months of August, September and October are all sewn together. November should have more blues in the blocks, but Saturday and Sunday are supposed to be 70 degrees, so maybe not, lol. The weather has been crazy all year.

New Year, New Projects

The weather has been bone chilling this month, especially at night; but we don't have much snow on the ground. When we first moved to Maine nearly 20 years ago, the snow might be up to my waist some winters, but not anymore. Snowmobilers and skiers aren't happy about it, but I'm fine with it. Pandemic or not, I've stayed in because it's just too darn cold to go out. 

The holidays passed uneventfully. My sister-in-law was here for two weeks, and it was nice to have the company. We worked on a puzzle together, something I hadn't done in years; and I enjoyed it so much that I hauled out a few more and built those too. The last one was 2000 pieces, and I have one left I haven't built yet that is 3000 pieces. That might be big enough, lol. Ravensburger, whom I heard from my SIL is a premiere puzzle maker, has one that is over 40,000 pieces. Can't imagine. 

Hardly any sewing got done in December because of the festivities and company, but I did manage to get the Holiday Extravaganza top put together. These fabrics were a collection from Alison Glass, and I just love them. Not a clue how I'm going to quilt this yet. 

Nothing much got done in January either, but the Christmas Cards I was working on as a leaders and enders project is now a finished top as well. The letters are machine embroidered, and the tiny Christmas bulbs make them look like strings of lights. No clue how I am going to quilt this one either. 

I'm not in the mood for One Monthly Goal anymore, preferring to start new projects and skip around between the new ones and the old ones. I updated it and left it in the sidebar simply as a space holder so I could remember how to do the html if I go back to it at some point. There seem to be a bunch of sew alongs that started in January, and I decided to follow along with a couple of them. 

Michelle Renee Hiatt's Best of the 60s mystery quilt actually started in mid December. This block of the week focuses on the use of Studio 180's Star 60 ruler; and as you can see, all of the blocks so far have been 60-degree pieced triangles. Clues up through clue 11 have been posted, but I've only worked up through clue 8 because I am having a bit of trouble with fabric choices. That should be resolved by clue 13, and then I can get back to work. 

There are three of each block so far, and I'm wondering if the entire quilt will be pieced blocks or if there will be any plain filler blocks.
 

I've had a couple sizes of Strip Sticks for quite a while, and they're working especially well to press open all the seams in these blocks. Batiks press up well anyway, but the strip stick helps my blocks stay nice and flat. 

For those who might not know, strip sticks are wood sticks covered with a thin layer of padding and some muslin. They are flat on one side and rounded on the other, making them especially handy for ironing strip sets. In blocks like these triangular blocks where there are a lot of seams close together, the strip stick is superb at isolating one seam so you don't accidentally mess up any surrounding seams with the iron. 

In February, Moda started a monthly sew along called My Favorite Color is Moda.Sampler style quilts are suddenly appealing to me again, so I bought a kit of fabrics in a colorway I liked plus the pattern book and got started.

I have never like working with solids, and this kit is all solids. Some of the fabrics in my Holiday Solstice were solids, hand dyed fabrics with a little texture actually, which I liked. So I decided I would give this a try. So far I'm bored, lol, but I think it will get better. 

The blocks in the sampler are variously sized, and block 1 is the largest at 36" square, big enough for a one-block baby quilt. I didn't imagine this block was so big in the picture above, but it's a pretty big quilt. 

The projects above are on hold for the time being, so I've switched gears to pineapple blocks. The colored blocks were swap blocks from years ago, and I dug them out two summers ago to work on at camp. The colored blocks are finished now and sewn together in rows of two; and I'm working on a border of blue pineapple blocks at the moment.

I've always been a slow sewist, slow at everything really; and these blocks take a long time for me to make. I'm about halfway there, and if I can make  two a day or every other day, I can finish the rest by the end of the month. Then there is another pieced border and some plain borders, so there's still a lot of work left to do. My goal is to have the quilt completely finished by mid May in time to register it for Maine Quilts 2021. It's virtual again this year, so the quilt has to be finished to take the photo.

Working with scraps always seems to beget more scraps, and the pineapple blocks are no exception. I continue to accumulate strings from strips that are no longer wide enough to use in a round. Coincidentally, I came across this block on Pinterest the other day, and a light bulb went on. This block is absolutely perfect to use up the blue strings, along with smaller chunks. I decided that my only rule for these blocks was that the fabrics had to be predominantly blue. Other than that, I don't care if the fabrics are prints, plaids, batiks, calicos, whatever. As long as they read blue, they're going in. No worries either about contrast or value, just sew them together. How refreshing! Mindless sewing at its best.

The pattern for this block linked from Pinterest to happyturtlequilts.blogspot.ca. If you search on Eastern Sunrise, you'll find it. It's 7-1/2" finished, and it's paper pieced, but that's not a hard and fast rule for me. If my strings are too narrow, I'll add more until the paper is filled. Plus they're pretty fast for me to make, a lot faster than pineapples anyway. A size 90 needle and a 1.5 stitch length makes quick work of removing the paper. Put together in rows, these blocks kind of remind me of barbed wire. I love this!

I plan to go through the stash and cull all my blue fabrics that are ugly, unappealing, old as the hills, or problematic in some way, and cut them up for this quilt. I could probably use the ones that are fat-quarter size or larger and piece them together for the back. Probably won't put a dent in it, lol. I also have a stack of muslin I've been trying to figure out what to do with, and these blocks will be perfect for that too.

Poking Along

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it's been a long, looong year. My family has stayed well throughout the pandemic, as I hope all of you have; but I am suffering from covid fatigue, election fatigue, civil unrest fatigue, and husband fatigue, and I know I am not alone. And by the looks of it, there is no end in sight to any of it. So! Perhaps reading and connecting with my favorite bloggers again will help!

We were up to camp more often this summer because hubby is now retired (husband fatigue). We have no internet up there, and cell phone service is sketchy; so I missed the first couple One Monthly Goal signups after the end of June. I was also discouraged with it because I won a prize in April and still haven't seen it. The host has responded to my queries, but still nothing. I haven't decided if I'll restart the OMG or not, even though I've left the widget in my sidebar.

Maine Quilts 2021, which is normally held at the end of July, has already been canceled; and we are gearing up for a virtual show instead. My quilt chapter, like so many others, has not met since February; and locally, quilt chapters most likely won't meet again for many months. Covid is rising sharply in Maine, as it is everywhere. In the meantime, I updated my UFO Challenge in the side bar from a group challenge with my chapter to a personal one. Lofty goals, and I may not finish a thing, but there it is. 

I have just been playing in my sewing room since July, making a few blocks here and there for new projects, experimenting, and learning new tools. I've probably said it before, but I am a big fan of the Studio 180 rulers. It is exactly the same concept as oversizing half square triangle units and then squaring them up; and the rulers work perfectly for a variety of units. 

Michelle Renee Hiatt is one of the certified instructors who branched out on her own, and I like her designs a lot. Even took a couple of classes with her at Maine Quilts one year. Last year, I discovered she was doing a holiday mystery medallion quilt, but I was too late to get in on it, so I had to buy the pattern. Michelle leaves each clue up for one week only. After that, if you miss a clue, you have to buy it. Still working on that one. 

This year her holiday mystery medallion was Holiday Solstice. It was a whole lot of sewing, and it looks complicated; but these blocks go together easily with the Studio 180 rulers. I still have to finish adding the last pieced border, then a couple of plain borders, then it will be Ready To Quilt. 

Her next mystery, Best of the 60s, starts this Friday. This one is not a freebie, but she offered a great price for the clues if you signed up right away. There is an awful lot of work for her in the instructions sheets, so I think it's fine for her to charge for the patterns. I bought one of the batik fabric packs she suggested, so I'm all set. Can't wait to get started. 

I've had one finish since July--this little Thimbles quilt. It measures about 9" x 12". I had a small bag of scraps that all coordinated, so I cut out the thimbles and pieced them as a Leaders and Enders project. Bonnie's Leaders and Enders challenges are fun to do, and I love the concept; but I don't seem to have the patience to work on a big project like that for a year. It finally occurred to me that making mini quilts as L&E projects holds my interest much better and greatly shortens the time to finish.

My next L&E mini is going to be an envelope quilt, made with a  baggie of Christmas 30s repros someone gave me. These little blocks will finish to 3" square.

 

 

Catching Up to July

I've been busy the last three months, but I can't even remember what I've been doing. Except, that, in May, I got myself involved with the state quilt show; and that has tied up an amazing amount of my time the last two months.

My granddaughter turned a year old last month, and we've spent as much time with her as we could. We also made a trip down to Maryland for a nephew's graduation. Thankfully, it wasn't too awfully hot, but I was still happy to get back to Maine weather. It's been a very nice summer here so far.

One thing is for sure, it's been kind of a dry year for quilting and knitting for me. I got exasperated with the 365 Challenge when it began to take up all my quilting time and I didn't have time to sew anything else. I am still collecting and printing out the blocks, and if it takes me three years to finish them, so be it.

I did finish up the last of the Farm Girl Vintage blocks but don't have the top together yet.

In April, Leslie Muir Volpe, a Maine artist who specializes in miniature quilts, did a workshop for my quilt chapter. I love minis and have been making them for years; even still, I learned a few new tricks from Leslie.

Our project for the workshop was Charming Churn Dash, and five of us finished ours by the next meeting. I am in the middle!

I put the workshop information to good use for this little sampler for a quilt chapter challenge. The quilt will finish at 24" square and contain 23 blocks in sizes 3", 6" and 9". The feathered star is the last block I have to finish before I can sew them all together.

The quilt has to be finished and turned in on July 19, so I don't have much time left. Nothing like waiting til the last minute, is there? lol

I put the last stitch into the binding just this morning on Neptune's Hexagons. As so often happens to me, I didn't like it when I was working on it, but now I do. Too late, I already promised it to my dear DIL.

It was constructed from a jelly roll plus background and borders.

Credit where credit is due: "Jelly Girl" by Joanna Figueroa of Fig Tree & Co.

I like the back of this quilt as much as or more than the front of it. It looks modern to me (and I know Nothing about modern), and I love the mixed up colors in the hexagons.

I wish I had had enough fabric to make the hexagons blocks all the way across, but I only had the one jelly roll, and I used every scrap of it. I did a progression thing, you know, 6 wedges, 5 wedges, 4 wedges and so on in the hexagons, but I'm not sure anyone understands it but me. My husband looked at it and wanted to know what was wrong with the blocks at the end. Sigh.

 

One bad thing--when I was squaring up the quilt after machine quilting it, I found a pin sticking out of the back of the quilt--not once, but twice. I use those flowerhead pins, and the flowerhead was lodged inside the quilt. Luckily, in both cases, it was close to the seam in the backing, so I was able to pick out a little bit of the seam, remove the pin, and stitch it back up.

No idea how those pins got left inside the quilt, never happened to me before. Isn't that your worst nightmare, to give someone a quilt and discover there are pins in it.