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.

Last Finish for January

You've probably heard of the Disappearing Four Patch? This is my Disappearing Sampler. This was from an online class in November, taught by Brita Nelson, the Questioning Quilter. She has a channel on YouTube where she teaches some Disappearing patterns, and I've been following her for a while. 

I thought her class would be fun, and it was, but also very stressful, which was my own fault because I hadn't prepared properly. She had us cut fabric ahead of the class AND sew up the starting blocks, like the four-patches and the churn dashes. None of which I did because I wasn't paying attention.

In the class, she directed us to cut up the blocks we sewed and shift the parts into different positions to create new blocks. I tell you, I was cutting and sewing furiously--I never made so many blocks so fast, lol, but it all worked out in the end.  

Originally I had planned to just watch the class and decided at the last minute to actually sew. So I grabbed the fabric closest to me and used it. Not a fabulous choice, but it served its purpose. Going forward, it will be a good reference for some other disappearing quilts I'd like to try.  

I finished the quilting the other day with a pantograph called Spinner. I hadn't used it before, but I do like the texture it created.

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!
 

First Finishes of 2024

 * Linking up to Oh Scrap!

I haven't blogged for quite a while, but I'm still here. It's disappointing to follow a link to someone's blog to read about their quilts, only to discover that they quit updating a long time ago. I always wonder if something happened to them, or if they just lost interest or what; so I won't do that. 

Last year was another year that was not as productive as I'd hoped. I did finish 10 quilts in the first half of last year, and then mostly nothing for the latter half of the year. 

I just finished this quilt a few days ago. It's called RST2 (Right Sides Together Squared) from 3 Dudes Quilting. It was a kit I found in Madison on a quilt chapter bus trip. I wasn't crazy about the pattern, but I very much liked the colors. I also liked that there was no specific background fabric. Wish I could find more patterns like that. 

I quilted it with a pantograph called Twofold Feathers, one of my favorites, from Urban Elementz.
 

These colors just sing to me.

I just finished this quilt today. This is another Fun Patch that I made with leftover pieces from the first one I made last year. The original quilt was an already made top I bought at a silent auction. I added blocks to the top to make it a little larger, but there were still many print pieces left over. And there are still more left over that will go into a third quilt.

This is a one-patch pattern with a single template piece. The copy of the pattern I have, called Fun Patch, I think, was from an old Quiltmaker magazine; but once I started hunting for it on the internet, I found it under various names, like Whirligig. I also discovered that Creative Grids makes a ruler to cut these pieces. The angle is not as steep, but using a ruler to cut out the pieces is a whole lot faster. 

I really like this pattern a lot. I can see it in a variety of fabrics or scraps or a rainbow version. I also made a miniature version from a French General charm pack, still just a top; and there's a second one in the works.

Last Finish for June

There is no rain in the forecast today, but more is predicted within the next week. The sun is peaking out through cloudy skies. We got another 4-1/2 inches of rain this week at camp. The water level at the lake is so high now that more than half our dock is underwater and the top step of those two little staircases is underwater too. The water level was three inches under the end of the dock when it was installed earlier this summer. When hubby goes out to the boat, the water is over his ankles. 

Last summer we were in a severe drought condition; this summer we're flooding everywhere. It's just crazy. Conditions have been just right for a sturgeon run up the Cobbossee stream that hasn't been seen here for 40 years. You can't see them especially well in this photo, but they're big, about 3-6 feet in length but up to 10 feet. These are Atlantic sturgeon, and they're spawning right under the bridge downtown. 

I planned to sew all day yesterday, but my plans were derailed by other work that had to be done; so I was up til midnight finishing this quilt. This is 'Feels Like Fall', a round robin my quilt group did, which we called the Tacoma Pizza Box Challenge. Each participant provided a center block and a pizza box full of fabric, and I included some yardage and an abundance of scraps in fall colors in mine.

We made our center blocks in early 2019, and the reveal was in June that year. I don't know why I never blogged about it, I just never did. 

I quilted it with a leaf design, which I liked but hadn't used before. The design is nice but maybe a little too open to suit me, so I'm not sure if I'd use it again. 

I love these embroidered labels. I had a lot of information I wanted to include, and I hate to write them by hand; so an embroidered one was just the ticket. I embroider almost all of my labels and have for years.

Another June Finish

I finished the Letters to Santa QAL quilt, which I renamed Family Christmas, a few days ago. I chose a pantograph called Nancy's Flakes from Dave Hudson for the quilting, and my longarm quilter did a great  job quilting it. 

The show theme this year for Maine Quilts 2023 is 'Christmas in July', and this quilt was entered in that division. The paper pieced palm tree, which has 51 pieces, is my nod to the 'July' part of 'Christmas in July'. 

Love this backing, which came from Marden's. They had it in three colors--red and green, green and white, and red and white, and I bought a lot of all three colors. I'll be sorry the day I use it all up!