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

Wrapping Up Some Projects

My quilters' Advent box from Missouri Star Quilt Co arrived three or four days ago. I enjoyed the Spooky Box I bought from Fat Quarter Shop in October, so I decided to treat myself again in December. It arrived in this box that's made to look like a suitcase, and inside....

.... are a bunch of wrapped, numbered giftie boxes and bags. I was curious about the advent box last year and found some YouTube videos online where Jenny Doan opens a gift every day from Dec 1-25. I thought the videos were fun, and I thought the gifties were fun; so I decided to give it a try this year.

 

Last week it was sunny and warm, and then boom! it was winter. It snowed briefly Wednesday morning, the first snow of the season. By mid morning, it had switched over to rain, and the little bit of snow melted away. Just a miserably damp cold day.

Because the weather has been cold and miserable, I hunkered down and used the last few days to clean up a few projects. Shar's quilt is finished and ready to be returned to her.

"My Favorite Color Is" was a project designed by Moda and became a quilt along on their Inspiration blog last year. I'm calling mine Coastal Cool, and I finished the top last October. It's been waiting for a backing since then, so I got the backing and batting cut and carted it off to another longarm quilter the other day. At 81" x 99", it is just too big to fit comfortably on my machine. I'm won't be able to get this back until January, so it's out of my hair for awhile. 

Missouri Star Quilt Co. did a tutorial for this Sashed Tumbler, which I finished during the first year of the pandemic. These were all fabrics left over from a group project my quilt chapter did. I  loaded it up on the longarm yesterday. I have a thread color picked out but haven't figured out how I'm going to quilt it yet. This one will be donated when it's finished.

I really don't like working with yards and yards of fabric; and after wrapping up three large quilts, I was looking for something different to work on. I came across this project, Shattered Angles, when I was hunting for something else the other day, so I dug it out to work on.

This was a class from Susan Purney Mark at Quilt University online in 2011. I got enough of the project done to understand the process, and it's been sitting ever since. 

Quilt University closed their doors when owner Carol Miller passed away some years back. It was later reincarnated as the Academy of Quilting, and some of the original instructors from QU migrated to that platform. Susan Purney Mark was not one of them, but she did write a book called Accent on Angles that details the process. 

Shattered Angles is not a difficult quilt to make it, even if it looks like it. In a nutshell, you make strip sets, cut them into sections, insert some separator strips, and then cut some blocks out of the resultant strips. I chose blues randomly, with an eye to value, scale, and fabrics I really wanted to get rid of. And so far I'm really liking it. I need 12 blocks for my quilt, and I'm halfway there.

I'm gone all day tomorrow, and Sunday it will be time to start making some preparations for Thanksgiving. We're having company on Thursday for a few days and a family get together on Saturday, so not sure how much progress I'll make next week.

Shar's Quilts

Like many other places around the country, we've had record breaking warm temperatures in November. And shortly we'll have record breaking cold temperatures! Like night times temps in the 20s for us. 

I'm caught up to date on November's row in my temperature quilt. Those cold blues are finally starting to make an appearance. 

My son remarried last year, and it turns out my new daughter-in-law's mother is a quilter. Or at least she used to be, up until 7 or 8 years ago. She made a bunch of tops and then seemingly couldn't figure out how to get them quilted. 

She took at least one to a longarm quilter and apparently wasn't happy with it. Then she bought a sit-down longarm and was too intimidated to use it. Fast forward, the quilts are still not quilted, so after Christmas last year I offered to quilt them for her. 

The brown, green and teal was the first one I finished for her, and I thought it turned out really well. I used a teal thread and the Daisy Swirl pantograph from Willow Leaf Studio to mimic the flowers in that light print. 

The next one was the Dora quilt, which was supposed to be for her granddaugher, who is now 13 and might find it too juvenile. No idea what Shar plans to do with it now. My son's daughter is now 6, and it might be perfect for her. 

I quilted the Dora quilt with the Twofold Feathers pantograph from Urban Elementz in purple thread. This is one of my favorite pantographs, and I thought it looked good on all the open spaces in this quilt. 

Both of these quilts I finished in April. 

I have one more of Shar's quilts in my possession, and it is this chain link kind of block. I've never seen this design before--it looks very modern to me. Has anyone else ever come across it?

And it's actually not a block design. The half hexie shapes are sewn together in long rows, and the center section is sewn in long rows, then all three rows are sewn together. Interesting.

There's some fullness in the print strips between the hexies, so I am using a less dense pantograph so hopefully no tucks anywhere. For the thread color, it didn't seem like much of anything would show up on that busy print, so I went with a variegated brown, which I thought looked okay in the hexies. 

A few more passes tomorrow on Shar's quilt, and maybe a few more blocks for the Scary Faces quilt.

Two Easy Finishes

We had another surprisingly warm day here in Maine, as it seems to be all up and down the East Coast. We were in a drought all summer but had so much rain this fall that the drought was overcome. Now the lawns look the best they've looked all year--just in time for some very frosty weather next week. 

The Christmas cactus is beginning to bloom. This crazy plant usually starts blooming before Thanksgiving and often continues to bloom until February or March. My granddaughter has broken segments off of it, I forget to water it half the time, and I don't know how many times it's been knocked off onto the floor. Yet it continues to reward me with beautiful blossoms every year. My summer cactus thrives equally well with the abuse I heap on it--had a ton of lovely white blossoms this past summer.  

I finished the Scrappy Mini yesterday. I didn't do the best job adding the borders, probably because I deviated from my usual method of border application and followed the paper pieced method from the book instead. Disappointing, but I wasn't about to take it apart a fourth time. 

Instead, I decided to try washing and blocking the quilt, which proved to be effective, as the borders are now straight enough to suit me. A small amount of bleeding occurred around two of the red strips however, but it's just for me and will hang in a dark hallway, so I decided to leave well enough alone. 

I finished the Construction Zone quilt this afternoon. This small quilt is going to a little boy in the family and will probably see some hard use, so I bound it all by machine. I find it difficult working with black fabric, and I had an awful time seeing the stitching for the binding, but I liked the black binding.
 

I quilted it with a design called Hot Rod by Lorien Quilting. Quick and easy, which I needed because I haven't been on my longarm for months. 

My next project is on the worktable. Scary Faces is a pattern for a small quilt included in my Spooky Box, an October special  from Fat Quarter Shop. The Spooky Box is like Quilty Box, a box full of surprises that comes once a month. I was always tempted to try that but never did. 

This year I decided to give the surprise box a try, and I wasn't disappointed. Besides the pattern, there was a small bundle of fabrics to make the quilt, and some different notions. One of the notions was a thread conditioner called The Thread Potion in a lip balm tube. I coat my thread with beeswax before hand sewing, but the beeswax cake tends to crumble after a while as the thread slices into it. Thread Potion is softer, and I was impressed with how well it worked--no tangling, no fraying, and no breakage. I would purchase this again, but I'm not sure if it was a one-time special for the Spooky Box since I can't seem to find it now on their website. 

So far I've made the four pumpkin blocks, but only this one has the stem and leaf added. And I've made 1 of 8 chain blocks. Haven't done any of the ghost blocks yet. The fabrics are adorable--spiderwebs, skeletons, bats, Halloween words, and some plaids and dots.

The millenium charm quilt is also back in play. I finished piecing all of the triangles, 1998 of them, last August. I couldn't figure out what to do for a border, so I waited for an idea to percolate. I thought it would look unfinished with just binding, so I decided to add a narrow inner border, maybe 1/2" to 3/4".

Next I wanted to add a neutral border, but it added nothing to the quilt, in fact it washed it out. A 1-1/2" border in a brighter off-white tone on tone fabric with a wider brown outer border improved the look, but the white looked too plain.

Yesterday I found this multicolored confetti print in my stash and decided that would do the trick. My quilt consultant (hubby) enthusiastically concurred, so that's what it's going to be. 

On the back of the quilt, I plan to add the last two triangles to make 2000, plus 22 more, one for each year past the millenium. I'll continue to add one every year in January--until I can't, lol.

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.