The Phoebe Quilt

We had another round of snow last night, another 6 inches or so, and just a few days after the last round. Because the temps have been so cold, nothing has melted; so we probably have a foot of snow on the ground now. Too bad it came so late in the winter before the ground froze because without that insulating layer of snow, we think the line coming off our septic tank at camp froze and split. Water ran down the hill under the sheds and froze, so the entire shed is now sitting on ice. Nothing to do about it now, but no idea what that will look like in the spring, but we'll get it fixed. More snow next week. Oh good. 

These are my sedums in the header photo, which we never cut down in the fall. I love how they look with the snow piled on top.

I spent all morning watching James Bond movies and finishing the Phoebe quilt. It finishes at 60 x 80. I intended to donate it; but hubby liked it, and I thought he wanted to keep it--until he saw a four patch quilt I started with the scraps from this one. Look! Over there! So easily distracted, lol. So this one will in fact go to Maine Veterans.

There isn't much blue in the quilt, so I used up another piece of blue fabric languishing in the stash for the binding. I also didn't have thread to match, so I used a variegated thread with that color blue in it, and I quite like the way that looks. Never occurred to me to do that before, but I'll definitely be using more variegated thread for bindings in the future. 

The backing fabrics were maybe 3-yard pieces that I've been wanting to think of a way to use for a long time. Truthfully, I don't know why they appealed to me. Maybe because they were a good buy at Mardens, lol. In any case, the middle piece is now out of the stash. More and more I'm liking the strip pieced backings on scrap quilts, an idea from Bonnie Hunter's blog. Great way to use up some stash.

This neutral strings quilt is the next one to get prepped for the longarm. When my friend passed away in 2017, I inherited 48 of these 4-inch string units.  

I had no idea what her plan was for these, and I didn't know what to do with them either because they're very busy. I finally decided to just sew them all together, and I really like the result. These are made of those low volume prints that are too busy for a low volume quilt, but they're perfect for this. 

The blocks came with a huge bag of strings in these mostly tan colors. Koleen loved those colors, but I much prefer whites and creams, so it took that much longer to figure out what to do with them. I needed another 72 units to bring the quilt up to the size I wanted, so I worked out of her bag of strings, and they blend well. That bag is so stuffed with strings that you'd never know I took anything out of it, lol, isn't that the way? The quilt is now 40 x 48, which will fit on the wall in my bedroom perfectly. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!

First Finish for 2025

We had about four inches of snow the other day, the biggest storm we've had this winter, I think. Florida has had more snow this year than Maine, lol. Bad news for skiers and snowmobilers, but I'm glad about it. The cold is the bigger story--single digits and teens during the days and below zero a few nights this week.

This is a plain and simple little quilt called 'Allure', a 3-yard quilt design from one of Fabric Cafe's books. I finished the top last year and never got it quilted. Too plain maybe, but I wanted to use up these fabrics. I have another cut out, same white and blue, different floral print; both of which will be donated. 

I used a pastel variegated thread to quilt it, which made it a wee bit more interesting. 

This is the next top to get loaded for quilting soon as I put a backing together; I finished this top last year too, and I'm just getting caught up with some machine quilting. This is the 'Phoebe' pattern from kitchentablequilting.com, but I set my blocks together in a completely different way. This is a larger quilt than 'Allure', so I plan to donate this one to the Veterans Home in Augusta.

 

This is what the original 'Phoebe' pattern looks like. Maybe I'll make this layout another time.

 

A Couple Other March Finishes

It was 40 degrees when I got up this morning, which was a nice change from below freezing temps. April has arrived in Maine, and that means less snow, longer days, warmer temperatures, and... flowers! My daffodils have been up for quite a while, but they are refusing to bloom until it warms up.

I finished this little strippy last month for my granddaughter. I was going to donate it to a good cause, but she saw the top and wanted to know if she could have it. Of course! It's a perfect little nap quilt for spring.

I quilted this in a variegated pink thread, and the daisy swirl pantograph looks so nice on it.
 

The pink flannel back will make it soft and cuddly.

Wiggle Time in 30s repros is finished too, which used up more fabric scraps from the quilt chapter bin. It takes most of a fat quarter to make one row, and I only had enough fabric for three rows. So I added a row from my own stash and duplicated one fabric for the fifth row.

For the backing, I pieced together larger chunks of that green and yellow fabric and used up most of that. Then from the 30s scraps that were left, I cut and pieced a scrappy row on the back. I really like this, maybe more than the front, lol.

Tis the Season came back from the longarmer about a week and a half ago. When I see the lovely stitching that a computerized longarm will do, I'm tempted to trade in my Tin Lizzie. It's a whole lot of money though, so I guess I'll think about it for another year. 

I have the binding sewn to the front and have yet to start hand stitching it to the back. 

My focus for the rest of this month is to finish the top of my Christmas Words quilt. This was a Moda QAL called Letters to Santa that started last July and finished at the end of November. I've been wanting to make a words quilt, so I issued a Christmas Words challenge to my quilt chapter for this year's Maine Quilts show, because the show theme this year is Christmas in July. It simply won't do for me not to get my own quilt finished, so I have to get this done!!

There are 6 or 8 filler blocks scattered throughout the quilt to even out the rows--trees, wreaths, stars, gift boxes, etc. For only one of those fillers, I wanted to make a palm tree, just to remind myself of this year's theme. I'll have to locate a paper pieced pattern somewhere. 

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.

OMG for April Done!

Good grief, I almost forgot to do my post for One Monthly Goal! I actually finished my quilt early this month, had it all done by April 22, then forgot about the posting.

To see what others accomplished this month, visit Elm Street Quilts by clicking here.

The Spinning Pinwheels quilt finishes at 36" x 48", just the right size for a charity quilt for the Margaret Murphy Center near my town. It was designed by Nancy Mahoney and appeared in Fons & Porter's "Scrap Quilts" magazine, Fall 2017.

It was fun to put together, easy with paper piecing; but the quilt top did not go together without issue. When I was constructing the very last block, I realized the pattern was off. The block itself went together perfectly, but when I started sewing the blocks into rows, things weren't lining up as they should. I eventually figured out that the pattern in the magazine had been drafted incorrectly. Isn't that just maddening??

No one would probably ever notice it, but the green leg in those skinny stars is slightly shorter than the yellow leg, and the whole star tilts very slightly because of it. The seams where the blocks join each other are all off by 1/4"; but I figured visually it was better to line up the green and yellow legs than the block seams. Darn good thing it was all bias edges because a little easing was required to get it together. Still turned out pretty well, I think.

I quilted it with the Popcorn pantograph from Willow Leaf Studio.

I did work on some other things this month, and that can wait til another post. I also started another scrap quilt, one called Sticks and Stones. One of the gals in my quilt chapter brought one in for show and tell one meeting, and I liked it.

One night a week or so ago when I was too darned tired to do anything else, I sat and sewed 162 two patches together. The 1-1/2" squares were cut out a long time ago, and there are plenty more where those came from.

Then I sewed together 6 sets of two-patch units--those are the stones, added a couple of 1-inch strips on either side--those are the sticks...

... and when I get enough of them together, they will make up the Sticks and Stones quilt, a pattern I found on Annie's Pattern Central.
I love this!

I still need probably another 150 two-patches for a quilt that finishes at 60" x 74"; so it'll be one of those projects that gets worked on here and there.

OMG for April

I figured out why it was that I was unable to leave comments on blogs with the drop down Comment box. I have no idea what settings bloggers use to get that box in the first place; but I now know that if you have third party cookies blocked in your browser settings, that will prevent you from leaving comments. I discovered that was the problem by googling it. It's a verb now, googling. I google everything. Google is your friend.

In my particular case, my son installed an add-on to my browser called Privacy Badger that blocks advertising and cookies as you are touring the web. You know all that advertising you get in the sidebars on Facebook? Gone. You know all the pop up windows you get on other sites? Gone, mostly. It works extremely well, but it can also block things you don't necessarily want to block. Luckily, you can turn off Privacy Badger for a given site. Once I did that, my ability to leave comments was restored. Yay!

After carefully considering several alternatives, I decided I wanted to get the Spinning Pinwheels quilt done this month for my One Monthly Goal. Right now I need to make 9 more sets of these triangular units for my finished blocks.

My goal for April is to finish the blocks and assemble them into a finished quilt. You can see what others have planned for the month of April by clicking here.

I'd still like to try and get Star Crazy quilted this month and get some more work done on the Sashed Tumblers. In the meantime, my quilt pal finally received the first installment of her Farm Girl Vintage 2 BOM. I already have a complete kit that I hadn't started yet, and I told her I'd work on it with her. This month her kit included the first 5 blocks out of a total of 50, I think; so right now we have nearly a full month to get them done.

This is my first one, Cheerful Tulips. Once I get the other four finished, I'm going to start working on the Vintage Christmas blocks, another Lori Holt sampler quilt. I bought the kit for that one last year and got all of the blocks cut out and bagged up but never really got started with the sewing.

OMG for October Done

Woo hoo, made it under the wire again, and two more UFOs bite the dust! One is Yankee Puzzle #1, and I'm donating it to a local veterans' shelter.

The other one is Stella Blue. I think my friend Koleen did an excellent job choosing the colors and fabrics.

See in the upper left corner of the photo, how five of the flying geese blocks are flying the wrong way? I panicked momentarily, thinking I got them backwards; but I double checked the pattern, and it's correct.Not that it matters, I suppose.

I used a pantograph that was more dense than I usually use, but it is the sort of thing I think Koleen would have chosen had she quilted it herself. In the end I very much liked it.

There are some excellent finishes this month. See what others have accomplished here.

I'm aiming to finish two more quilts in November. The blocks for the Missouri Two Step are all put together, just need to add some borders. And I have a BQ2 quilt top finished and ready to quilt. 

I made this sewing gadget holder a week or so ago. The pattern was given to me by a friend, and unfortunately it wasn't attributed. I hunted for it on the internet but no luck. Anyway, it is nothing more than a quilted cover with pockets that slips over a freestanding acrylic 10" x 8" picture frame. Quick to sew and oh so handy. 

Not having made one before and not having a photo in front of me, I didn't realize that so little of the base fabric would show on the front. This is the back of the sleeve, and I really wanted to see more of this fabric on the front. Had I known, I would have used my focus fabric instead of the red for the bottom pocket. I have more of the selvage fabric, so maybe I'll gift this one and make another to keep. 

I also made a bunch of soap this month. Candy corn... 

Beehive soap, scented with honey...

And animal soaps for my granddaughter.

I like to admire my soaps, so I line them up across the windowsill in my kitchen, lol. DGD stayed with us a couple weekends ago, and she piled all the soap bars into her big teapot and played with them all weekend. Sometimes the simplest things are the most fun.

Yankee Puzzle

I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday cutting and kitting up fabric for this Yankee Puzzle quilt. This picture is an image from EQ8, but I do have one made up. My quilt chapter is very charity minded, so we are having a workshop next month to make 10 of these quilts to donate to a local area veterans' shelter. The chapter paid for all of the materials for these quilts; so several of us washed, ironed, and cut fabric for the kits. I think a few chapter members will also make their own quilts, so hopefully we'll have more than 10 finished quilts.

For those who are interested, the designer wrote instructions to construct the quilt and made a series of step-by-step videos detailing each step. That post is here.

This was my chapter's raffle quilt from our show this past October. It's called Scrap Crystals, designed by Bonnie Hunter. (Yes, we got permission to use it as a raffle quilt.) My dear friend Koleen passed away in July 2017 from cancer, and one of the things she told us before she died was that she wanted Tacoma to have this quilt for our raffle quilt. At that point it was still just a top, so one of our members quilted it, I bound it, and it became part of our October 2018 quilt show. We earned over a thousand dollars from ticket sales from Koleen's quilt, half of which we just spent for the Yankee Puzzle kits.

The winner of the raffle quilt heard the story about Koleen and gave the quilt back to us because he thought one of our members should have it. We again raffled the quilt, internally, and awarded it to one of our members. From that second raffle, we earned  $760. Thursday five of us made a trip to the Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care in Augusta to donate those funds, to be used for cancer patients within our own communities. I think Koleen would have been very pleased.

I bought this puff quilt for my granddaughter and her brother for Christmas 2017. This is one of those things that I never had a desire to make and was more than happy to pay someone else to do it, swore I'd never make one. About two weeks ago, dear DIL, who is not a quilter, in fact can barely thread a needle, decided she wanted to make one of these things. So! I hunted down a YouTube video detailing the process, and I will be spending the day today helping her put this together....

I'm taking this cute little apron down with me today for my granddaughter. It's vinyl-coated fabric, not stiff at all, so just a quick wipe to clean it up. One of my friends actually made it for one of her great grandchildren; but it was too small, so she gave it to me. What I absolutely love about it is that there are casings on the sides, so you can adjust the size of the tie around the neck. Brilliant!

Baby Girl has always loved to put things in my shirt pockets, so I wanted to make her an apron but never got around to it. Problem solved! She's two and a half, so I think it will fit her just fine. Barbara gave me the leftover fabric from the apron, so I added the pockets after the fact.

That's Progress

We are finally on the back end of last night's nor'easter, and I think we have a foot or so on the ground. Before last night, most of our snow had melted, which I was glad about. Now they are already talking about another potential nor'easter on Monday/Tuesday. It's really been a very strange winter here in Maine.

The weeks have really flown by, and progress has been made on several quilts. This one is Stella Blue, by Miss Rosie's Quilt Company, pieced by my dear good friend Koleen. I've mentioned Koleen once in a while on the blog. She passed away last July after a nine-year battle with cancer, and I miss her so much sometimes that my heart hurts. Koleen left most of the contents of her sewing room to our other dear good friend and me. As a consequence, I inherited this top, and I'll return it to Koleen's husband when it's finished. Up close, it's a gorgeous quilt.

Koleen pieced the middle of this top before she passed away, and she made the flying geese units but hadn't sewn them into border strips yet. I had a devil of a time adding them because her quarter inch seam was a less generous than mine, lol. But it's now ready for quilting.

Welcome Home, Baby was my February finish. I bought several packages of those Cake Mix triangle papers, which I think are very clever. I have become a big fan of creating half square triangle units with triangle papers. I usually print my own from the Inklingo software or Brenda Hennings' Triangulations software, but the cake mix recipes were something different and fun.

I also bought some Cupcake Mix papers, which make smaller quilts; and this quilt was made from a block design on the Cupcake Mix #1 package. I had two sets of the block panels, so I'll make another one of these at some point to use the other panel.

I have two pumpkins left to stitch out for my Halloween quilt, and then I can add the borders and toss it in the RTQ pile. Yay! I enjoy machine embroidered applique, but the prep takes time, so this has been a long slog.

And this is my One Block Wonder, an experiment from Maxine Rosenthal's book of the same name. The stack and whack quilt I finished in January was supposed to have been a workshop last year for my quilt chapter, but it was cancelled due to weather, so I made it on my own. The workshop did occur last month finally, but I wanted to try some other stack and whack project, so I dug this fabric (on the left side of the photo) out of the closet and decided to give it a try. Didn't think I'd like it, but actually, I love it.

I still need to shift a few blocks around along the left and right edges, but I've already started sewing vertical rows with the blocks in the middle of the quilt. Only half the hexagon block is sewn together, then vertical rows are sewn and joined so there are no inset seams.

All of these quilts were new projects, started within the last six months or so. When they're finished, I've GOT to get back to the UFO pile.