June Finish

We seem to be in a pattern of mostly clouds and rain this spring and summer. At the beginning of June we had a few days in the upper 80s and even low 90s, and we might have had only one mostly sunny day since then. I'm sure the tourists are not happy.

I can't say I mind because work at home has kept me from spending much time at camp anyway; and if it's cloudy and rainy outside, then the neighborhood is quiet, and I can get my work done. I do love my peace and quiet. 

I haven't had a lot of time to sew either, but sewing still gets done behind the scenes. I finished the binding and label on this quilt yesterday. It is the Tis the Season block of the month from Missouri Star Quilt Co. I worked on last year. 

 

I took this one to Whippersnappers in Manchester for quilting because it was too big to fit on my machine. I don't know what design she used, but it has small snowflakes in it and some quilting that reminds me of strings of pearls, and I just really liked it. 

The quilt finishes at 82" x 91", so a good double bed size. 

Whippersnappers also did the quilting for my Letters to Santa quilt, which is getting the binding treatment today. Yay! I anticipate this one will be another finish for the month.

Some Finishes

Yikes, it's been several weeks since I blogged! I don't always realize how much time has gone by since the last post.

The weather has been crazy over the last couple of weeks. Seems like for a while there we were getting snow every other day. And it seems like we've gotten more snow this year than the last couple. 

I'm busy all the time with lots of different things. I've done two more loads in the freeze dryer this week--fresh asparagus and chili; and a load of sweet bell peppers going in tomorrow. We still can't get over how different freeze dried food looks, and the fact that it's so close to fresh or freshly made when it's rehydrated.

I fit in as much sewing as I can; but you know, some days it just doesn't happen. I did finally get some finishes last month. The Coastal Cool sampler quilt came back from the longarmer, and she did a beautiful job.  

Above is a picture of the whole quilt from my pattern cover-- and mine looks just like that, haha. It's a big quilt, so it's hard to get a view of the whole thing at home. The dimensions are odd for a bed quilt, but it still fits better on a double than a queen, so that's where it will go. 

I finished this scrappy quilt on the last day of February. My quilt chapter had an in-house silent auction, and I bought this top plus some extra fabric that went with it. The top was already assembled, but I added one more vertical and horizontal row to extend the size. It was a fast finish, and I thought it would make a fine donation quilt. 

This is an interesting pattern. I hunted high and low for the name of it and finally found it under a couple of different names, like Whirligig. My friend referred to it as Fun Patch, so I named it One Patch Fun Patch. 

It really is a one patch quilt, and Kathy Doughty used an improv version of it in a couple of different ways in her book 'Making Quilts'. One of those was "Fractured" which was a favorite of Wanda's at Exuberant Color. I'd like to use this one patch again, only in a different layout.

I used a variegated gold thread for the quilting because I thought it went well with all of the different fabrics; and I quilted it with a daisy swirl pantograph. I used this same panto on one of Shar's quilts, and it's getting to be a favorite of mine.

At the beginning of March, I got the binding on the Ribbon Candy quilt, that had been hanging around the sewing room for too long. 

Coincidentally I used a pantograph called Ribbon Candy too. Not sure I like it, but it's done!

I am working on getting the binding on a small quilt for my granddaughter right now; and this one, another Wiggle Time quilt from Cynthia Brunz Designs, is on the frame. I used that same daisy swirl pantograph for both quilts.

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.

New Year, New Projects

The weather has been bone chilling this month, especially at night; but we don't have much snow on the ground. When we first moved to Maine nearly 20 years ago, the snow might be up to my waist some winters, but not anymore. Snowmobilers and skiers aren't happy about it, but I'm fine with it. Pandemic or not, I've stayed in because it's just too darn cold to go out. 

The holidays passed uneventfully. My sister-in-law was here for two weeks, and it was nice to have the company. We worked on a puzzle together, something I hadn't done in years; and I enjoyed it so much that I hauled out a few more and built those too. The last one was 2000 pieces, and I have one left I haven't built yet that is 3000 pieces. That might be big enough, lol. Ravensburger, whom I heard from my SIL is a premiere puzzle maker, has one that is over 40,000 pieces. Can't imagine. 

Hardly any sewing got done in December because of the festivities and company, but I did manage to get the Holiday Extravaganza top put together. These fabrics were a collection from Alison Glass, and I just love them. Not a clue how I'm going to quilt this yet. 

Nothing much got done in January either, but the Christmas Cards I was working on as a leaders and enders project is now a finished top as well. The letters are machine embroidered, and the tiny Christmas bulbs make them look like strings of lights. No clue how I am going to quilt this one either. 

I'm not in the mood for One Monthly Goal anymore, preferring to start new projects and skip around between the new ones and the old ones. I updated it and left it in the sidebar simply as a space holder so I could remember how to do the html if I go back to it at some point. There seem to be a bunch of sew alongs that started in January, and I decided to follow along with a couple of them. 

Michelle Renee Hiatt's Best of the 60s mystery quilt actually started in mid December. This block of the week focuses on the use of Studio 180's Star 60 ruler; and as you can see, all of the blocks so far have been 60-degree pieced triangles. Clues up through clue 11 have been posted, but I've only worked up through clue 8 because I am having a bit of trouble with fabric choices. That should be resolved by clue 13, and then I can get back to work. 

There are three of each block so far, and I'm wondering if the entire quilt will be pieced blocks or if there will be any plain filler blocks.
 

I've had a couple sizes of Strip Sticks for quite a while, and they're working especially well to press open all the seams in these blocks. Batiks press up well anyway, but the strip stick helps my blocks stay nice and flat. 

For those who might not know, strip sticks are wood sticks covered with a thin layer of padding and some muslin. They are flat on one side and rounded on the other, making them especially handy for ironing strip sets. In blocks like these triangular blocks where there are a lot of seams close together, the strip stick is superb at isolating one seam so you don't accidentally mess up any surrounding seams with the iron. 

In February, Moda started a monthly sew along called My Favorite Color is Moda.Sampler style quilts are suddenly appealing to me again, so I bought a kit of fabrics in a colorway I liked plus the pattern book and got started.

I have never like working with solids, and this kit is all solids. Some of the fabrics in my Holiday Solstice were solids, hand dyed fabrics with a little texture actually, which I liked. So I decided I would give this a try. So far I'm bored, lol, but I think it will get better. 

The blocks in the sampler are variously sized, and block 1 is the largest at 36" square, big enough for a one-block baby quilt. I didn't imagine this block was so big in the picture above, but it's a pretty big quilt. 

The projects above are on hold for the time being, so I've switched gears to pineapple blocks. The colored blocks were swap blocks from years ago, and I dug them out two summers ago to work on at camp. The colored blocks are finished now and sewn together in rows of two; and I'm working on a border of blue pineapple blocks at the moment.

I've always been a slow sewist, slow at everything really; and these blocks take a long time for me to make. I'm about halfway there, and if I can make  two a day or every other day, I can finish the rest by the end of the month. Then there is another pieced border and some plain borders, so there's still a lot of work left to do. My goal is to have the quilt completely finished by mid May in time to register it for Maine Quilts 2021. It's virtual again this year, so the quilt has to be finished to take the photo.

Working with scraps always seems to beget more scraps, and the pineapple blocks are no exception. I continue to accumulate strings from strips that are no longer wide enough to use in a round. Coincidentally, I came across this block on Pinterest the other day, and a light bulb went on. This block is absolutely perfect to use up the blue strings, along with smaller chunks. I decided that my only rule for these blocks was that the fabrics had to be predominantly blue. Other than that, I don't care if the fabrics are prints, plaids, batiks, calicos, whatever. As long as they read blue, they're going in. No worries either about contrast or value, just sew them together. How refreshing! Mindless sewing at its best.

The pattern for this block linked from Pinterest to happyturtlequilts.blogspot.ca. If you search on Eastern Sunrise, you'll find it. It's 7-1/2" finished, and it's paper pieced, but that's not a hard and fast rule for me. If my strings are too narrow, I'll add more until the paper is filled. Plus they're pretty fast for me to make, a lot faster than pineapples anyway. A size 90 needle and a 1.5 stitch length makes quick work of removing the paper. Put together in rows, these blocks kind of remind me of barbed wire. I love this!

I plan to go through the stash and cull all my blue fabrics that are ugly, unappealing, old as the hills, or problematic in some way, and cut them up for this quilt. I could probably use the ones that are fat-quarter size or larger and piece them together for the back. Probably won't put a dent in it, lol. I also have a stack of muslin I've been trying to figure out what to do with, and these blocks will be perfect for that too.

June Finish

June was not the best month--one thing after another went wrong, mostly trivial things, but still. The worst of it was when we broadsided a deer on the interstate in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. My husband, who was driving, saw the deer emerge from the woods, headed for the highway at a full gallop. He managed to slow down from 70 to 55 mph, but we hit the deer so hard that the poor thing just exploded. My son, who was coming along behind us about a mile back, said there was only half a carcass left on the highway. Thankfully we had the pickup truck that day, wouldn't have wanted to think what would have happened in the car. Just got the truck back yesterday from the auto body shop--$2600 in damages.

The Department of Transportation is cutting back the growth further and further away from the highway; but at 70 mph, there's not a lot of time to react. The auto body shop and the insurance company both reported that there have been a lot of deer strikes this year because we had such a mild winter. Two winters ago, the deer stripped my evergreens at the front of the house. Night after night, I'd watch through the window around midnight, and three or four of them would come and munch on my plants. By the end of the winter, they consumed nearly all of the greenery. My neighbors' evergreens suffered the same fate. I didn't see the deer this past winter, so they must have found things to eat in the woods.

I did not finish the Mountain View Lodge quilt, which was my One Monthly Goal project for June; but I did finally finish the Star Crazy quilt. Yay! Only took me 10 years, lol.

I quilted it with an all over feather, Plumage, I think, from Willow Leaf. I got off on one of my rows and had to restitch a few places after I got it off the frame, but it didn't take long.

SO glad to get this done!

Credit where credit is due: Star Crazy design by Sue Garman, for Alex Anderson's The Quilt Show, 2009.

Company is coming tomorrow for several days--my sister-in-law who visits once during the summer and right after Christmas every year--and there are other activities planned for the month. Of course I'll be at the sewing machine this month, but I hesitate to commit to a One Monthly Goal. I have a few more days to think about it.

Another thing that took some of my time in June was hand dyeing. There's a Bonnie Hunter string quilt I want to make that uses 4 yards of solid yellow. I used to hand dye cotton years ago, and it occurred to me that it would be a lot less expensive to dye my own yellow than to purchase it. I kept all my supplies over the years, thinking I might get back to it; and I still have a bunch of prepared-for-dyeing (PFD) cotton.

I had to buy new dye, of course; and ProChem has evidently changed some of their formulations. The Golden Yellow I bought 20 years ago was more yellow than what I just dyed some fabric with. I now have some cheddar colored fabric that would probably look great with some Civil War repros. Clearly it will be a process to find the right yellow. In the end, it might be cheaper to just buy it, lol. Still having fun with it though, so I'll keep going.

More soap and lotions got made in June too--a new herbal shampoo bar that smells so lovely, another batch of hair conditioner, another batch of bug repellent, a spray to ease sunburn, some lavender violet face and body cream, and some honeysuckle rose salve. I picked the honeysuckle blossoms and infused them in a lightweight oil, along with some dried rose petals, to make the salve.

The timing of that turned out to be pretty good. My husband was pulling some vining weeds out of the junipers yesterday, and evidently the oils in the plant were toxic as he now has a bumpy red rash all over his arms and belly. We don't think it is poison ivy or poison oak--don't know what it is, truthfully. Haven't been able to identify it online.

Last night before he went to bed, he applied Cortisone on one arm and witch hazel on the other to see which worked better. The itching woke him up during the night, so he tried the honeysuckle rose salve and said that worked the best.

There are courses in herbology that you can take, and they are not inexpensive. I've always been a little dubious that herbs really can alleviate all the ailments they say they can; but I have to say, I'm beginning to be a believer. I bruised my tailbone two summers ago taking my granddaughter down a metal slide at the park, and after a year it wasn't better. I started applying a pain stick I made that contains arnica and cayenne red pepper, and it has helped so much that it mostly doesn't bother me anymore. I've used it for other aches and pains, and it does seem to really work well. Even if it's all in my head, if the pain goes away, I'm all in, lol.

January OMG - Mission Accomplished

My One Monthly Goal for January is completed, quilted and bound. This was my little Twister quilt that I'm calling "It's A Girl!". Backed with flannel, which is my favorite backing for kids quilts.

To see what projects others completed in the month of January, click here.

The quilt was quilted with a simple pantograph, Angel Wings from Willow Leaf Studio, I think. You almost can't see the quilting because of the cirles in the background fabric, haha. Simple was good in this case.

I've been busy with other quilting projects too all month but very scattered in my approach. Seems like everybody had a new block of the month starting up at the beginning of the year, and I started collecting the instructions for no less than four of them, lol, and I'll be starting another with a friend later this month.
-- Michelle Renee Hiatt is doing a mystery quilt on her blog, Sew On The Go, called Grand Central. I am still working on her last mystery, Ticker Tape Parade, which just finished last month, I think; so I haven't started the Grand Central yet.
-- Alex Anderson's The Quilt Show online has started a BOM from one of Sue Garman's patterns, Afternoon Delight. I saw Sue's quilt a long time ago and always liked it, so I'm collecting the patterns for that one.
-- Moda is hosting their third Blockheads block of the week on their blog, so there are over 50 blocks that will be presented. There are 14 participating designers, each of whom will contribute one or more blocks. I decided to make mine up in batiks that I've had sitting around in the stash for years. The blocks can be made in multiple sizes, so I have to decide what I'll do for a layout before I can start sewing. I think I'm going to go with multiple sizes like the Blockheads 2 Moda hosted in 2018.

--The last one is the only one that is an actual BOM where the instructions and fabrics are shipped every month. Esther's Bloomers is a block of the month by Kim Diehl using her new Heirloom Shirtings collection, and I loved it when I first saw it back in November. It's a 6-month program, so fabric and instructions for multiple sections are shipped every month.

This is the center block. I made a bunch of four patches from a variety of backgrounds to surround it. Some have applique, and I'm still working on those. I think the next installment  ships around the 10th of the month, so I have time yet.

One of my friends will start receiving her Farm Girl Vintage 2 BOM kits later this month. I already bought the book and the fabric collection, so I'll do mine along with her. Lori Holt of Bee in My Bonnet, who is the designer, has already started a quilt along on her blog, so we'll follow along with that too.

Guess that's enough Blocks of the Month!

This is not a block of the month, just what I hope will be a fast project to make to use up some fabric and which will probably be my One Monthly Goal for February. I'd like it to be a shelter quilt to donate but haven't decided yet. It is Happy Trails from a tutorial by Missouri Star Quilt Company using a different setting that I really liked. I modified the size so I could get a larger quilt and also so I could use my Studio 180 rulers, which I have come to love.

I may make some other blue and white scrap quilts this year. I want to make a few more shelter quilts and also some quilts for camp. Next up is a blue and tan snowball quilt with a flying geese border from last month's issue of American Patchwork and Quilting. I've made snowball blocks before but never a whole quilt full, and I think it will be relatively quick. Plus I can use my Studio 180 Corner Pop ruler on the corners so I don't have to draw all those lines on the corner squares. A great invention, those rulers. Wish I'd had them years ago.