Orca Bay Part 2

All my blue string blocks are done-- finished the last of them late this evening. They were fun, and I'll make these little string pieced blocks again in another project.

Part 3 calls for 350 half square triangle units. I already have 120 sewn, and the rest will go quickly. I probably won't get back to them until Sunday though, because we are headed north tomorrow to visit my son.

It snowed most of the day today, light snow with about an inch of accumulation. The weather has been strange this winter. We had a warmup at the end of December, then it got bitter cold for several days. But we have NO snow on the ground other than the inch we got today, which might not bode well for plants that need a blanket of snow to protect them from the deep cold. Hope the weather is decent tomorrow.

Orca Bay Mystery

Bonnie Hunter started posting the parts for her annual mystery quilt, Orca Bay, in November. There were 8 parts altogether, posted over a period of about 7 weeks. All of the parts have now been posted, and the full quilt has been revealed.

I started working on mine shortly after Part 1 was posted in November and finished probably 50 of 224 double hourglass units before Part 2 was posted. It was all sort of downhill from there. I did as Bonnie suggested, doing a few units from each part if you couldn't keep up. A good idea, and I was going right along up to about Part 5, and then things got too busy because of the holidays.

After New Year's I went back and started again with Part 1, and tonight I finished all 224 double hourglass units. Yay! I feel like all I've done for weeks is make double hourglasses. Doesn't really look like 224 little blocks, does it?

For Part 2, I need 72 cute little blue string blocks. I managed to get 40 of those sewn up last month, so only 32 to go. Tomorrow is a sew day at Koleen's, so I'll get the rest done tomorrow.

Happy New Year

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions because I never keep them, but this year I'm making an exception because there are a few things I'd really like to do this year.

Resolution #1: Manage my time better.

All last year I quizzed my friends about how they structure their days because they seem to get so much more done than I do. Time management is an elusive thing for me, and I recognize that I waste a lot of it and really could accomplish so much more. So this year I'm going to try to make some inroads with this. I really don't have a strategy for accomplishing this yet, other than "Just Do It".

Resolution #2: Get back to blogging.

Back in July when I stopped blogging, it was because my husband went on travel for a month, and I was left with trying to keep up with yardwork and some other things along with all my regular chores. I was really busy last summer, and something had to give, and it was blogging. Prior to July I was rather feeling like I was spending too much time on the computer anyway, so I didn't mind giving it up. I checked my email occasionally on my iPod and rarely turned on my computer.

Truth is, I miss writing on my blog and miss reading all my favorite blogs. So I'm making the effort to get back to blogging. I just have to find the right balance so I'm not spending too much time at it.

Resolution #3: Complete at least one UFO a month.

Even though I haven't been so successful with this, I plan to keep plugging away at it. The One Project a Month challenge that Kris sponsors restarts at the end of this month, and hopefully she'll have a new blog button for it. I've already removed last year's projects from my sidebar but left the old blog button for the time being.

Resolution #4: Complete one pair of socks a month.

I actually may have made darn near 12 pair of socks last year, but this year I'll make it official. Denise Russart has launched a sock challenge, 12 in 2012, from her blog, and I signed up. There's no prize or anything, just the satisfaction of knowing I'm using up the yarn and getting socks made.

I have a few other resolutions for 2012, but I'm not feeling the same level of resolve for those, so I'll keep thinking about them. In the meantime, if anyone is still reading my blog after all this time, Happy New Year to you!

A Little Liberated Quilting

This may not be liberated quiltmaking in the truest Gwen Marston sense of the word (even though she did publish a book on string quilts), but it was certainly liberating for me, and it's probably as liberated as I'll ever get. Making a string quilt is truly mindless piecing at its best. Anything goes, and it's a perfect portable project. I can run my mouth all day at sewing group and I can't screw anything up!

For the pieced strips, I cut foundations from muslin or whatever fabric I had laying around that I didn't really have a use for, 4" x 8", and pieced scraps on them using a sew and flip technique. Then I sewed the pieced foundations end to end until I had a strip long enough for my quilt. The pieced strips were then alternated with solid strips and sewn together to create the top. The solid strips were cut 3-1/2" wide.

I needed 150 foundations for the pieced strips. Each vertical row required 11 foundations plus half of another to complete the row.

A queen sized quilt, 93" x 93", requires 12 solid strips and 13 pieced strips, plus borders. I added a 7" wide border on either side and a 7" wide border on the bottom. My son who is receiving this quilt is crazy about that burgundy batik and wanted the wider borders. The top of the quilt will probably be covered up with pillows, so I didn't really want a top border.

The quilt is on the longarm now, and I got about half of it quilted today. Tomorrow I'll try to get the other half done. The plan is to have it quilted and bound by the end of the week for delivery to my son. Lots of work left to do still.

The idea of working in a series appeals to me, and this was a fabulous scrap buster, so I have four more string quilts planned. When I get around to it, the next one will also be a vertical strippy, only the pieced strips will be all different widths.

A Finish for July

Finally, I'm blogging again. Last week my son and his bride were up for the week from South Carolina. The week before that I was getting ready for them to visit, the week before that I was gone to Vermont for Quilt Festival, and the week before that I was getting ready to go to Vermont. Now that I have an iPod and an iPad, sometimes I don't turn my computer on for days, so no blogging has got done.

I don't think I've done any sewing since the beginning of July. In fact I'm sure I haven't because I finished this little strippy on July 1, and that was the last thing I remember working on. It was one day too late for the June finish, but the One Project a Month Challenge is still serving its motivational purpose. I think I'll have another finish this month, maybe two.

I so enjoyed my son's visit. Even though the weather was really nice while they were here, we didn't do much of anything. Truthfully I think the kids were content to just laze around the house, playing on their phones or the laptop. We've discovered an app for the i devices called Words With Friends, like Scrabble, which kept us entertained all week.

The kids were accompanied by a 2-year old Jack Russell named Zeek and a 10-week old puppy named Cairo. Long drive for them from South Carolina, but they were well behaved. The puppy was adorable but required constant supervision because he chews on everything, and because he is a long ways from housebroken. By the end of the week, I was thinking that this is when I liked him best--when he was napping. The kids had the good sense to crate train both dogs, and oh! what a blessing that was.

The kids left Sunday to drive back down to South Carolina. I loved having them here, and I'll miss them, but I'm happy to have the house back to myself. I'll be cleaning most of the week, I suppose, but I'll get some sewing in too.

May Finishes

It's been a long while since I've posted to the blog. We're nearly halfway through the year and I've written nine posts. That's pitiful, so I guess I'd better rectify that!

I was really busy the month of April working on these two small challenge quilts. They were due the first week of May, and I actually finished them on time, binding and all. Then I spent the month of May catching up on all the stuff I put off in April while I was working on the quilts.

The pink and green one, "O' Tacoma", was designed by our chapter president as a mystery quilt in three parts. I liked the fact that we had to choose only three fabrics, but the challenge of assembling the quilt more than made up for it. I really liked this quilt when it was finished.

My other challenge quilt, "Snow Day", was a Mix and Match challenge. Each participant drew slips from five categories, which determined the parameters for the quilt they had to make, and each quilt had to measure 24" x 24" at completion. The categories were Theme, Embellishment, Color, Fabric, and Block.

The Theme for the quilt could have been one of the four seasons or a holiday. My Theme was winter.

An Embellishment, like ribbon, lace, yo yos, buttons, etc, had to be included somewhere in the quilt. My Embellishment was ribbon, and I cut small lengths of ribbon, laid them in the center of the star blocks like little pickup sticks, and stitched them down.

My Color, which had to appear in the quilt, was yellow.

The Fabric which had to be included could have been a novelty, polka dot, batik, solid, something like that, and mine was plaid. The snowmen, which were machine embroidered appliques, had patches on each snowman; so I cut a patch from a small scale plaid and stitched in place over top of one of the embroideries.

The Block we chose had to appear somewhere in the quilt, and there was an additional requirement that the block measure 12". My Block was Dutchman's Puzzle, which I placed in the middle of the quilt and then embroidered the snowmen on top of it. I used flannel for the snowmen bodies so the blue background wouldn't show through. They turned out pretty nicely, I thought. You can see the rest of the challenge quilts here.

My last finish for May was this small kids' quilt. The top actually got done quite a while ago, and I finally got around to quilting it.

April Fool's Day

Need I say more?

Since we had stormy weather today, I spent much of the day cleaning up paperwork. Afterwards I went down to the sewing room to play in the fabric. I've never made a bargello quilt before, so when my LQS offered a class, I decided to take it. I am supposed to cut fabric strips before class; but the class is not until April 9, so I'll have some time to make any color adjustments. I think I'm pretty satisfied with the way the colors look now, though I'm still not quite sure about the third one from the right in the top row.

We are making this quilt as the class project, which is from a book called Twist-and-Turn Bargello Quilts by Eileen Wright. This looks a little complicated for a first bargello quilt, but I'm going with it.