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.  

 

Winter Garden

These are my Winter Garden blocks, from a kit by Julie Burton of Running Stitch Quilts. I discovered her website late last year and found her Garden series. There are three so far; waiting for the last one, Autumn Garden, to drop within the next month, hopefully. 

I liked all of the Garden blocks soon as I saw them. Not throwing in the towel with traditional quilts, but I need a change. After following several modern quilting blogs for a couple of years now, this year I've decided to finally start making some modern quilts. Maybe modern traditional would be more like it, lol.

These are big blocks, 20 in a throw-sized quilt, so I am making one a day, sewing each row as I complete the four blocks in the row. The plan is to finish the top by the end of the month.

I have never been one to do all the cutting up front, but I've done this a few times recently and love having the cutting all done. A word to the wise though--make up one block before you cut up all your fabric in case you don't like it!

After the cutting was finished, I laid out all the pieces for each block....

... stacked them all up in order on paper plates, and I just pull one off the top of the pile everyday to sit down and sew. Sew convenient!
 

Some Finishes

Yikes, it's been several weeks since I blogged! I don't always realize how much time has gone by since the last post.

The weather has been crazy over the last couple of weeks. Seems like for a while there we were getting snow every other day. And it seems like we've gotten more snow this year than the last couple. 

I'm busy all the time with lots of different things. I've done two more loads in the freeze dryer this week--fresh asparagus and chili; and a load of sweet bell peppers going in tomorrow. We still can't get over how different freeze dried food looks, and the fact that it's so close to fresh or freshly made when it's rehydrated.

I fit in as much sewing as I can; but you know, some days it just doesn't happen. I did finally get some finishes last month. The Coastal Cool sampler quilt came back from the longarmer, and she did a beautiful job.  

Above is a picture of the whole quilt from my pattern cover-- and mine looks just like that, haha. It's a big quilt, so it's hard to get a view of the whole thing at home. The dimensions are odd for a bed quilt, but it still fits better on a double than a queen, so that's where it will go. 

I finished this scrappy quilt on the last day of February. My quilt chapter had an in-house silent auction, and I bought this top plus some extra fabric that went with it. The top was already assembled, but I added one more vertical and horizontal row to extend the size. It was a fast finish, and I thought it would make a fine donation quilt. 

This is an interesting pattern. I hunted high and low for the name of it and finally found it under a couple of different names, like Whirligig. My friend referred to it as Fun Patch, so I named it One Patch Fun Patch. 

It really is a one patch quilt, and Kathy Doughty used an improv version of it in a couple of different ways in her book 'Making Quilts'. One of those was "Fractured" which was a favorite of Wanda's at Exuberant Color. I'd like to use this one patch again, only in a different layout.

I used a variegated gold thread for the quilting because I thought it went well with all of the different fabrics; and I quilted it with a daisy swirl pantograph. I used this same panto on one of Shar's quilts, and it's getting to be a favorite of mine.

At the beginning of March, I got the binding on the Ribbon Candy quilt, that had been hanging around the sewing room for too long. 

Coincidentally I used a pantograph called Ribbon Candy too. Not sure I like it, but it's done!

I am working on getting the binding on a small quilt for my granddaughter right now; and this one, another Wiggle Time quilt from Cynthia Brunz Designs, is on the frame. I used that same daisy swirl pantograph for both quilts.

One More November Finish

I should probably change the photo in my header since fall has gone by; but I love the colors, so I'll leave it up a while longer.

I finished quilting Sashed Tumblers the other day and got it bound yesterday. Every bit of the fabric in this quilt came out of the chapter stash bin, including the binding. Tacoma Lakes Quilters made a raffle quilt in 2020 for a quilt show we intended to have, which never happened because of the pandemic. For whatever reason, the group that worked on the quilt made yards and yards of binding, and there was more than enough left over to use on this quilt too. And there's still some left over. 

The piecing was simple, so I chose a simple pantograph, Ebb and Flow from Hermione Agee; and I like how it turned out. Plus it was pretty quick to quilt.

The backing came out of Tacoma's scrap bin too. The tan print had been kicking around for years, and I used all of it up on the back of this quilt. Just a few scraps left over from the overage. 

This block is from a quilt design called Dart by Amy's Creative Side. I think I found it on Pinterest. I liked it so much that I had to make a block just to try it out.

And just like that, another UFO was born. 

Amy wrote a blog post about the Dart quilt here, and of course there's a photo of the whole quilt. The block looks simple, but it makes a great design when a bunch of them are all sewn together. Must make this!

 I recently discovered Cynthia Brunz's blog, and I have spent quite a lot of time reading her old posts. She has some wonderful ideas for scrap quilts, some of which I definitely would like to make at some point. She also hosts a link up on Sundays, so I'm linking today's post to her blog. 

Linking up:

Quilting is more fun than Housework

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.