Almost There

First, sometimes I am just exasperated at how difficult it is for me to leave comments on other blogs, to the point where I just give up. When I manage to have some success, they don't always show up on the person's blog. I don't know whether it's because they never got it, or if it's because it never got moderated and posted. 

I too have enabled moderation on my blog, but I have comments forwarded to my regular email address. I don't always get them, particularly if it's been a while since I blogged, and I don't always think to check the blog, which means I may not respond. My apologies if I failed to respond to a comment. 

Today I had to go into the blog and delete about 8 spam comments, all from the same source. So I fully understand those who also have comments moderated. Who needs all that? I also accidentally deleted a comment from Alycia, who hosts Finish or Not Friday. No idea how to get it back. :(

So today is Finished or Not Friday on Alycia's website. Linking up here. Or not! Can't get the LinkZ to work correctly. 

Finished or not? No! But almost there--on several fronts. I finished the quilting on Tango yesterday and got the binding machine stitched to the front ...

... and started hand sewing the binding to the back this morning. I machine stitch binding on a charity quilt but hand stitch the binding on quilts I plan to keep. It's the only hand work I really do anymore, and I enjoy it. Sometimes I think maybe I should start hand piecing again, but it never happens. 

For the quilting, I used a pantograph called Gussied Up by Urban Elementz. I hadn't used it before, but it was easy, quick, and fun to do. Not a very dense pantograph, which seemed fine to me given the finished size of these blocks. 

 

The little hourglass blocks are all sewn together now, and every single edge is on the bias, so that should be interesting when I get to binding. A little extra care may be required.

 I had three blocks left over that didn't fit in the quilt. I plan to incorporate them into the backing but in a little bit different way. I have a fairly plain light blue backing picked out, and that should work just fine. 

I have been hell bent on finishing all the scrap bin fold up baskets, and I now have 8 of the 11 baskets I had planned done. 

As you can see, I am using rainbow brights for the baskets, and each basket has a lining with a white background and a small motif the same color as the outer fabric. 

 

I was stumped however, when I got to the one for neutral scraps, until I found these two fat quarters in the stash. These so work for me, and this basket is done!

Same with the one for multicolor scraps. How perfect is this!

I'll be making the last three, orange, purple, and multicolor over the weekend. I don't often come across  black scraps, so I eliminated that color in my line up. Didn't have any more room across my countertop anyway, lol. 

I am a fan of Emily Dennis at Quilty Love. I like her aesthetic very much, and I look forward to her newsletters. She wrote one the other day about some string blocks she was making. It might have been just in her email newsletter because I'm not seeing it on her blog. 

Anyway, she was using scraps of batting to do her string piecing on instead of fabric of paper, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Who among us doesn't have batting scraps? I have bunches. Her only concern was the bulk in the seam allowances when she sewed the blocks together. 

It occurred to me to cut the batting square to the finished size and sew the strips on. I asked Emily about it, and it had occurred to her too, only she said the batting shifted when she tried it. 

Then it occurred to me to sew the strips on using a walking foot, and that worked pretty well! You can see in the photo, that the batting square still measures a pretty square 7", which is what I started with, with some minor pulling away at the edges. I haven't tried sewing two squares together yet, but I think I can work with this!

  
 
 

My chapter is having a Stay in Your Own Bed retreat in April. We did this last year and had a blast. The idea is that you go to the venue, sew like a maniac all day, then go home, sleep in your own bed, rinse and repeat next day. It's a three-day retreat and catered for lunch for a nominal fee. 

The coordinator for this event likes to have some little giftie bags for each participant, and this year she decided to do personal care items. I volunteered to make soap, so I am making spools, buttons (two to a bag because they're small), and flowers, all in spring colors. I only have one spool mold and two button molds, so I can only make a small batch at a time, and I can make about three batches a day to allow them time to set in the mold. 

I need about 25 all together, and I have 17 done now. Plenty of time for the rest--started early because I didn't want to be rushed. 

So many projects, so many things in my head, so little time. If you're bored in this life, you're doing it wrong. 

A Very Crafty Month

My yard still looks exactly the same as it did in the photo from my last post, only there's more snow. A LOT more snow. We had a little January thaw in the middle of the month, and most of the snow on the ground melted. Sunday's nor'easter dumped 14 inches in my town, and it's been so cold there's no hope of melting. We're still waking up to mornings near or below zero this week with daytime highs in the teens. Perfect sewing weather!

The second little Courthouse Steps mini got finished earlier this month. The fabrics are mostly the same as the first one, except where I ran out of the original fabric or changed my mind. I hang my minis down my hallway wall with the Command strips, which work perfectly, and this one has been hung.

I finished quilting the big Courthouse Steps yesterday afternoon. Once I settled down to work on it, I was surprised how fast the blocks went--they're 14 inches finished. The quilt will finish at 56 x 70 inches, which is a fine size for a lap quilt. This one will be donated to Maine Veterans Home after I get the binding on. 

I used a pantograph called Two Fold Feathers by Lorien Quilting. I love this design because it's easy and not too dense, and because I love feathers. The large scale of the pantograph worked well with the big blocks, I thought. 
 

With the last of this hunting print stripped into the middle of the backing, I had just enough green to finish it off. More fabric out of the stash, my quilt chapter's stash, that is. 

It would be nice to get another finish for the month of January; but with only two days left in the month, I doubt that will happen.  

At our second chapter meeting this month, we did a square in a square workshop for charity. The blocks are set 7 x 7 and finish at 7", so the quilt should finish at close to 50" square. 

These block were pretty fast to make, and I especially liked them because the on point squares are floating; that is, after the seam allowance is taken, the point of the square is back from the seam line. That means nothing to match when you sew them together. 

There are plenty of patterns out there for square in a square blocks and variations, so I could see another one of these in my future. 

 We cut 5" squares for the centers of these blocks, but you could substitute a pieced square if you wanted. Coincidentally, Studio 180 just came out with a brand new ruler for nine patch blocks in nine sizes or something, so for example you could put a nine patch block in the center. Or you could change the dimensions of the outer triangles so you didn't have to deal with crazy math. 

The Tango top has been finished for a little while and will be the next quilt to go on the frame. This was from a workshop I took with Diane Harris, the Stash Bandit, last summer at Maine Quilts. It was a fun class, but I changed up my methods a bit when I got home. The fabrics are all from my Lori Holt collection. Because like 30s repros, they just all go together, lol. 

This is another pattern I've seen around the web in different sizes and variations. SewCanShe has one called Fancy That, 1 and 2, I think. 

The block size was pretty big, and I took all my cutaways from the corners of the big blocks, turned them into half square triangle blocks and sewed them together this way, which will turn into a nice sized baby quilt. 

I'm hoping I can find a backing fabric in the stash big enough to quilt both of these tops at the same time.

I have large scrap bins with lids in every color squirreled away in another part of the sewing room. The organization of said scraps occurred several years ago, here, one of the most sensible things I ever did. Additionally I had a big drawer full of scraps, also sorted by color, that I could dive into for something quick or throw in a few handfuls left over from some other project. It was handy to have that drawer full so accessible right in the sewing room. When it got too full, I'd move some scraps into the larger bins. 

Last month I guess, the triangles got out of control; so I moved all the scraps out of the drawer and replaced them with these containers of triangles. These are baby wipe containers I saved from when my granddaughter was still in diapers, because what good quilter doesn't save all kinds of containers? 12 of these containers fit perfectly in the drawer, all sorted by color. Brilliant.   

Then I had nowhere to throw a few scraps before I either sorted them into the big bins or used them. So I cleared everything off my countertop, and I am making these small bins in rainbow colors for a quick toss of a handful of scraps. 

I am loving these containers. The pattern is the medium fold up basket from SewCanShe, and they finish at about 5-3/4 x 7 inches, plenty big enough for a few good handfuls of scraps. After the sewing is done, the flaps allow you to fold it up into a basket. 

These fold up baskets are available in three sizes. The directions are free on the website, but you have to contend with ads; so the patterns are also offered as pdf files for $5. 

You need two fat quarters to make the medium size basket, so that's another half yard out of the stash! 

The best part about these containers is that they're easy to sew, there's no hardware to attach, and they unfold to store flat. This is what it looks like unfolded. 

I have three made so far and trying to get two more made this week. 

Two more ornaments were finished this month. This one is called Bethlehem Star....

... and this one is called Reflection and was given to a friend for Christmas. 

I finished this little cross stitch last week too. This design hung in the bathroom in my friend's quilt studio for years. When she passed away, it was given to our other friend Sherry. 

I hunted in vain for the pattern online and never found it, so I borrowed it from Sherry and duplicated it. At long last it is finished. The cost of having it framed like Koleen's original is stupid, so I want to make it into a small quilt. I haven't a clue how to do that right now, so I'm trying to find out something about that online. Blue Pip Designs has a little tutorial on how she finishes her small cross stitch pieces, so there's a starting point. 

Somewhere in there, a dishcloth got finished this month too, but I didn't take a snap of it. 

More fun next week! 

**Linking to Alycia's  Finished (or not!) Friday

 

 
 

Reassessing the Scrap Situation

I started making some blocks in January when the color blue was announced for the Scrappy Rainbow Challenge. In February when the color pink was announced, I started work on a different set of blocks. By March, I was so darn frustrated digging though boxes of scraps to find the colors I wanted that I threw up my hands and set to heck with all of it. I finally realized that my time would be far better spent sorting the scraps that I've collected over the years by color.

For years I subscribed to the Bonnie Hunter Scrap User's System, dutifully cutting up scraps left over from quilts I'd made and cutting up more out of the scrap bins and feeding them into containers for squares and strips. It was and still is a daunting task. The sad part is that they seem to get used very little because it never seems to be what I need at the moment. I usually find myself digging around in the bins instead.

I have a lot of scraps. Like a mountain of scraps. Like multiple boxes, bags,  and big Rubbermaid tubs of scraps. The obvious solution is to simply get rid of them, but that's just not ever going to happen because I love my scraps too much. And people keep giving me more to get them out of their sewing rooms. I never turn down scraps. Sometimes I even buy them. It might be a sickness. 

So I settled on a different plan. The owners of quite a few of the blogs I've been frequenting lately sort their scraps by color, and I thought that was worth trying. So I bought 14 clear plastic bins from Walmart and started sorting. These bins are 15 x 10 x 9 inches tall; and I will tell you, it is astonishing how many more scraps you can store if they're laid out flat instead of throwing them willy nilly into a container. 

I started with two of these tall tubs full of scraps and worked my way through  three of the smaller tubs. I also sorted through multiple plastic bags of scraps, and a few more stacks laying around the sewing room.

One of those stacks were the ones I had gotten from Barbara. It got too hard to keep track of what quilts I was working on that used up some of her scraps, so I abandoned that idea and sorted them into the rest of the bins. I also took down the Page I had at the top of the blog called Barbara's Scrap Bag.  

I used these smaller open top bins to sort by color; and I had separate piles of neutrals, batiks, strings, multicolored prints, and crumbs that either went into plastic bins or other established containers in the sewing room. As the open top bins filled up, I moved the scraps to their larger bins.

I also had smaller piles of plaids, solids, Christmas fabrics and block parts that were dispersed to other parts of the sewing room. The block parts will either be seam ripped or chopped up to go into a Whackadoodle quilt. More on that another day.

I had an excess of blues, greens, and surprisingly browns, and purchased a couple more bins for those. 

I had the least amount of yellows, pinks, and oranges, which didn't surprise me; but the reds were also in short supply, which tells me I did use lots of those.

After the dust settled, I now have a lovely wall of colorful scraps, all neatly stacked inside and ready for use. I still have two more large cardboard boxes full of bags of scraps to sort, but I'll have to work down the  scraps in the bins first because they're full. Which of course is the whole point -- to use them!