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.

Ringing in the New Year

New Year's is not a big holiday for us, so it came and went without event. Sister-in-law and I spent a few days building two 1000-piece puzzles gifted to me by my daughter-in-law's mother. 

Because there was not a lot of variety in the color, I anticipated they would be more difficult than they actually were. With two of us working at them, we finished each puzzle in just a couple days. 

This past Wednesday at our chapter quilt meeting, someone gifted me a bag of six more puzzles, lol. So I have plenty to keep me busy. 

In the meantime I've been working on this 1000-piece Norman Rockwell puzzle. I failed to notice that the back of the box said "random cut", so there are a lot of very strangely shaped pieces. More challenging for me, but it's going along.

It's fashionable these days for bloggers to review the year prior. In particular, many quilters are assessing what they accomplished the previous year and what they'd like to accomplish in the new year. I can get onboard with that. I listed 9 big quilts and a grouping of 3 minis on my UFO Challenge 2022 tab and managed to complete 4 big quilts and 1 mini. Even though I didn't get them all finished, three of them were years old UFOs, and I felt good about that. 

I do plan to make myself a UFO Challenge list for 2023, and I suppose what didn't get finished in 2022 should be added to this year's list. The problem is there are so many projects I'd like to finish this year that it's hard to choose just 10 or 12. 

One of the things I'd like to do this year is to participate in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2023 hosted on the ScrapHappy blog. I did this a few years ago, and it took me another year or more to finish the quilt. In her write up about this year's challenge, Angela (I think that's her name) mentioned that, instead of a rainbow quilt, you can make some other scrappy or stash busting project, so long as you're trying to focus on the color of the month. That is an approach that appeals to me. The color for this month is bright or dark blue, and I have several blue or blue and white projects I started a while back. I would like to make some headway on those.

It's A New Year...

... and migosh, it's already February. Time moves so quickly these days. Last year was an extraordinarily busy year for me. Staying busy with the family accounts for much of that time, but I also worked two quilt shows during the summer and fall, and then the holidays. There simply are not enough hours in the day.

And soapmaking. I spend more time reading about soap than I do about quilting. I took a couple of adult ed classes in January and February last year and learned how to make cold process soap. I've been hooked ever since. I make it on a small scale for family and friends, and I really like experimenting with all the different ingredients you can add to soap. I've added body butters and lotions to my repertoire, and my extremely dry skin is so much better for it this winter.

This past Christmas, my son indicated he wanted to learn; so I bought him all the tools and some reference material; and he's as hooked as I am. Now my daughter-in-law has gotten in on the act, and my younger son told me yesterday he wants to learn too. I'm lovin' it.

This is a lovely batch of orange-scented soap with some marigold petals on top that I cut last week. I'm anxious to use it, and I wish I didn't have to wait for it to cure for four weeks. 

I managed to finish 12 quilts last year, some of which were in the works for quite a while. All of the ones featured in the last post, which was from May of last year, were completed. Nothing like commitment to display at a quilt show to motivate, and here are the others I finished last year.

Jungle Blooms was my first effort making a One Block Wonder quilt, from Maxine Rosenthal's book of the same name. I really enjoyed making this, and I absolutely love how it turned out. Can't wait to make another one. The cutting and piecing are not difficult, and moving the blocks around to create a design was absorbing.

I quilted it with something that looked like a palm frond, which I thought appropriate for the theme.

I was very happy indeed to finish Twisted Ribbons. I don't know how many times I blogged about it, and it dragged on and on. Decided it was time to knuckle down and get it finished, and it went in our chapter show in October.

Farm Girl Sampler from Lori Holt of Bee in my Bonnet was a fun quilt to make, but it definitely wasn't a quick quilt. All the blocks were made with rotary cutting instructions, no templates or applique; so some of them took a bit of time to make. I've already purchased Lori's newest book of sampler blocks, Vintage Christmas, and looking forward to getting started on that one.

Lori designed additional blocks that were not in the original quilt, so I subbed out the house for the cow block. There's a barn and a milking pail in the quilt, so I thought, why not?

I don't knit much anymore, but I was happy to include the sheep anyway.

I was also happy to see Lori included a spool block. The gingham plaid is cute enough to make a whole quilt with. Lori's book had quite a few other projects in it besides the sampler quilt, and blocks were all included in two sizes. There is so much you could do with these blocks.

This year will be another year with multiple charity quilts, and some golden oldies for a chapter UFO Challenge. This Quilt of Valor is from a kit that the state rep gave me to work on last October. The ribbon border was a pain but worth the effort. I've been trying to make time to get it loaded for quilting, but that hasn't happened yet... I've finished a few other tops that are also in the RTQ (ready to quilt) pile, and you'll see those eventually; but the Quilt of Valor is the next one I need to push to finish.

Dakota Farmer

Bonnie Hunter's latest book was released a few weeks ago, and I already have a copy in my hot little hands. It is based on the column that she writes for Quiltmaker magazine, "Addicted to Scraps".

Dakota Farmer was one of the blocks I found in her column. At the time, I was just getting onboard with soscrappy's Rainbow Scrap Challenge, so I started making these blocks. I did change the outer border to suit myself.  I think Bonnie usually puts up on her blog a mockup of what a quilt using that month's block might look like, and that's where this layout came from. Finished it in August.

These cute little 3" flying geese blocks were another block featured in her column. I started making light and dark versions and have in mind a particular setting. Heaven knows how long it will take me to get enough done to make a quilt because I am paper piecing mine. One nice thing about these little blocks is that they use up a lot of small scraps.

We had a very long, hot, dry summer, and I'm glad we're finally down to the 60s. 38 degrees here last night. Fabulous! Despite the dry weather, my sedums still look beautiful. They'll deepen in color to a burgundy by the time fall is over.

A Good Week

Weather up here in Maine seems to be particularly difficult to predict, and I don't know why. Case in point (and there are many): Friday I was scheduled to take my friend to her doctor's appointment. I knew there was snow in the forecast, but I double checked the forecast in the morning right before I left the house at 8:00, and I wasn't worried. They were only predicting 3-6" of snow.

Her appointment lasted about an hour, we had a little lunch in the hospital cafeteria, and headed back to her house. The drive was bad and worsening by the time I dropped her off and headed home. I nearly lost it twice at the intersections because the snow was so wet and slippery. By the time I got home about 1:30 in the afternoon, we had 8-1/2" on the ground; and we got another inch and a half by the time the storm ended.

Yesterday the original prediction for Monday night and Tuesday was snow showers. This morning I measured five more inches on the ground, and I noticed the forecast had been updated. The weatherman must have finally looked out his window and revised the forecast. Sheesh!

Although I didn't get as much time for sewing as I would have liked over the last week and a half, I did manage to finish the QOV top. Still need to find some backing fabric and get it loaded for quilting.

The Candystripes top is also finished. I didn't particularly enjoy making this quilt . I was glad I only had to suffer through making a 36" square quilt. I also learned I don't care for pastels. 

I had bunches of 4-patch units left over; and since I didn't want to make another Candystripes, I started making 36-patch blocks out of them. I had exactly enough 4-patch units to make 9 big blocks.

This quilt, which will also be donated, needed to be about 36" square like the first one. A horizontal set wasn't going to get me there, so I set them on point, and that'll put it a little over 38", so I'm good to go. I've made one of the alternate blocks and have set a few triangles in place for the remaining blocks and setting triangles.

Wish I could credit this to a designer, but I found the photo in a quilt catalog from some company I never heard of, and it wasn't credited in the catalog. They simply called it "Postage Stamp Stars". I get these oddball catalogs once in a while, probably because one of the magazines sold my name to a hundred different places.

The red Twisted Ribbon is finished, and I put all of them on the design wall to motivate me to keep going. I have five more ribbons to make, two browns, two greens, and a blue-green. There are no borders on this quilt, so when the columns are done, the quilt top will be done.

Finished my sister-in-law's socks and mailed them to her. She received them and sent me back photos of how they fit--perfect! Yay!

I love scraps and have been given many over the years. Our quilt group has an auction every other year as a fundraiser; and they always have a multitude of scrap bags too, so I usually buy a few bagfuls. I think it's great fun to see what other people are sewing with, and it's a great resource for little bits of this and that that I don't have in the stash.

Bonnie Hunter had a photo on her blog recently showing some scrap sorting she was doing on her living room floor. I was inspired by that photo enough to dig out a scrap bag from the auction and go through it.

It needed to be washed to remove some odor, and it's a job I absolutely dread because it always becomes a horribly tangled, wrinkled mess. Even washing them in a mesh laundry bag in the washer hasn't helped.

This time I tried a different approach. I sorted the scraps into three bins in the tub, one each for lights, mediums, and darks. After adding a little liquid soap, I mashed them up and down in the wash water, rinsed them the same way in clean water with vinegar (for total odor removal) in it, spin-dried them in the washer, and tossed them in the dryer.

What a difference! Much less fraying and tangling, and they came out of the dryer all fluffed up and relatively wrinkle free. After sorting them the way Bonnie was doing, an XL Stor-It bag stuffed with scraps has been tamed into nice neat piles.

It will probably be about three months to finish the renovation in the kitchen. Hubby has commenced the demolition, and the contractor will be out next week to measure the spaces and write up the contract for the cabinetry.

The kitchen is probably original to the house, built about 1950. At present there are only cabinets on two walls, and this doorway to the dining room is at the end of one of the walls. The white cabinets in the dining room (homemade by a previous owner) had to be angled at the front because of the doorway. It's quite awkward.

Everyone seems to be quite charmed by the blue metal cabinets, but I can't stand them and can't wait to get rid of them. We're installing red birch instead.

Now the doorway has been moved over, widened, and framed in. A space has been cut in the adjoining wall to set in the refrigerator, which was next to the stove. We'll have a floor to ceiling pantry and appliance closet on that same wall, cabinetry on three walls in total.

A soffit over the cabinets also had to be removed. Hubby finished that work over the weekend, and some order in the kitchen has now been temporarily restored. Things will be inconvenient and messy for a while, but it'll be worth the wait.

Quilter At Work

I'm glad the holidays are over, but I hated to take down the Christmas tree because I was enjoying the lights in the evenings. So we just took it down Tuesday, in time for pickup on Wednesday.

I've been a busy bee in the sewing room the last week and a half, organizing and lining up projects for the month. There are six, including three UFOs, but some will be ongoing. First up is a Stack 'n Whack, from a Bethany Reynolds workshop back in 2008. I actually blogged about it back then, and it's languished. It only needs one more side of the binding stitched down, and it will be finished.

 

Candystripes is another UFO from a very long time ago. The project is from an issue of American Patchwork & Quilting, and it was originally to be for my niece. After I made over 100 of the four patches, I realized that it wasn't really suitable for a kid her age, so... it languished. Now our quilt chapter is working on quilts for incubator babies, so I'll make small quilts, about 36" square or so, until all the four patches are used up. This is the first--6 rows of blocks x 9 blocks down. Maybe I'll have enough for three little quilts.

The Twisted Ribbons quilt I started last year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was resurrected and is the last of the UFOs to be worked on this month. There were 12 ribbons in all, and I'm working on the 6th, so it will be an ongoing project for a few more months. I decided not to start this year's RSC until the Ribbons are finished.

Moonglow is a Block of the Month pattern from Jinny Beyer that's been around for a decade or more, maybe two. A knitting pal of mine started it when it first became available, made three blocks, then it languished. Last year she talked to me about helping her get it finished because she'd invested quite a bit for the kit. She'd made the first three blocks with templates, and she'd had a little trouble with them; so we ripped them apart, and I taught her how to paper piece. Her sewing skills are rusty, so I wound up remaking the first one for her and will remake her next two, then start her out fresh with block 4.

I'd always wanted to make the Moonglow quilt too, so I found a kit at Plum Creek Quilts for a ridiculously low price and bought it. My first block is finished too; but I have to say, I much prefer the colors in my friend's quilt. Unluckily most of her fabrics are no longer available.

Project Five is Talkin' Turkey, from Bonnie Hunter's string quilts book. One of my dearest friends and I decided to work on this together in the new year. Late last year she was diagnosed in stage 4 cancer; but she's decided to forge ahead with me, so Sundays will be our Turkey Tracks (as we're calling it) days. The plan is to make 10 of these string-pieced blocks at a time until all 120 are done, then we'll move on to another kind of unit. I made a few blocks for the border too. Her treatment program gives us hope, so we plan to see this through to the end.

The first Quilt of Valor in a series of six this year is in progress. It is from a kit purchased two summers ago at MaineQuilts. The pattern is from a Thimbleberries book and is so simple to make. The fabric does all the work in this one.

That's good, to have a quick one for this month, because I have other projects to finish! I have at least two more QOV's that will be made using panels, but I'll alternate them with ones that are all pieced.

On the Design Wall

I swear I don't know where the time goes. The color of the month for May for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was green, and I finished up my green ribbon this morning. I stayed mostly on the cool side of green; and since green will appear in my quilt more than once, I set aside a pile of warmer greens for future use.

This green ribbon is adjacent to the blue one and is also the last one on the right side of the quilt, so there are plain squares at the edge that make a border on that side of the quilt. I'm getting a little more daring with multicolor prints in these ribbons because it seems to be more interesting than plain tone on tones.

See what others are working on here.

I also finished up the yellow Dakota Farmer blocks from last year's RSC and started sewing some of the blocks together. This block was from Bonnie Hunter's "Addicted to Scraps" column in Quiltmaker magazine, and she has a layout for it on her blog. I just realized this morning, looking at the picture, that there's a border of 3" dark blue half square triangles around the whole quilt. Not sure yet if I'll actually add that border, but probably. Perhaps it will look unfinished otherwise.

Orange is the last color that goes in the quilt, and I've started cutting for those. All throughout the quilt, I tried to use background prints that were white or off-white with motifs matching the same color as the stars and not repeat them more than twice. I've managed to pull that off so far, but I just don't have enough background prints with orange in them to make this last batch of seven blocks work that way. Sue Nichols uses all those fancy embroidery stitches built into her machine to create her own backgrounds, so I might try that with a few of mine. Coincidentally there's an article in the Quiltmaker magazine that just hit the newsstands with the very same idea.

I have a little bit more quilting to do on the Cascadia quilt. I'm just doing some quilting in the ditch as it doesn't really need much to hold the layers together. Sometimes I wish I had time to do some hand quilting, but I'd never get it done. Besides I'm not sure I could hand quilt without a hoop, and this little quilt measures about 16" x 17".

This colorful fellow showed up at the bird feeder the other day. I was very surprised to see a pair of Baltimore Orioles at the feeder last fall, and evidently they've come back. The photo doesn't do that gorgeous orange color justice.