Running Hot, Cold and In Circles

This week I have a cool blue quilt finish that hasn’t been shared here before, the weekly progress on my hot-colored quilt top for the Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR), and some news (read: whining) about the beginning of the seasonal onslaught of HOA work. 

Let’s start with the blues. No, I’m not going to sing for you. You’re welcome. Blue is the February color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This week I completed the string blocks - 60 of them. Four groups of 15 for Quilts for Kids; the “cools” referred to in the blog title

The blocks are 6.5” square. I love making string blocks, and there is more of that planned for later in the month.

This week I also finished a quilt from scraps I obtained last year. At the 2024 World Wide Quilt Day festivities held here in the Salt Lake Valley at the Sandy Senior Center, they were distributing quilt “kits” made of miscellaneous scraps that were semi-color-coordinated. You had to sign up to take a kit and every kit had a number. They retained a picture of the scraps so that they could verify that you used most of the scraps. We were also free to add our own scraps. The challenge was to use the scraps in a quilt, of any design, and ultimately donate it to charity. Easy Peasy. I do that all the time with my scraps and Quilts for Kids. 

But. (You knew that was coming, eh?). The kit looked charming on the outside, but some of the pieces were totally gag-worthy. Also, two long strips I was given had the selvage edge and little holes (you know, from the reels during the printing process) along the length of them. After trimming that off, about half the length was unusable for a 3.5” width, the minimum piece size I needed. (Clear as mud?) but I included it, along with a couple questionable gray pieces and teal pieces. I added the white and the navy. Here’s what I can up with. 

What drew me to this kit was the cute dolphin WHALE fabric and the bright blue water fabric. but the stripey stuff was a challenge. Anyway, the pattern I originally drafted was for 10” (finished) squares, but I had to reduce them to 8” to accommodate the scrap sizes. The individual block pieces are cut: center white strip of 2.5x8.5”, and two side strips composed of a 3.5” square and a rectangle of 3.5”x5.5” pieces. The colored side pieces are flipped on either side of the center white strip. When sewn, it makes the 8.5” square. When the blocks are sewn, they’re flipped horizontally and vertically, like a sort of basketweave pattern. I interspersed 8.5” squares of the dolphin fabric and used almost every square inch of it.

Honestly, I was disappointedly in how the colors panned out. But it’s done, and it will be donated after I check it in at WW Quilt Day to be entered into a random prize drawing. I already have the Quilts for Kids label on it. I quilted it with loops. It measure 40x55”, a decent kid size.

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This week we were also challenged with Round Four of the SAHRR. This week’s hostess was my friend Wendy of Pieceful Thoughts. She challenged us to make sliced blocks. You know, cut the block, insert a strip or turn it or otherwise manipulate it. Clever! 

This is where my hot-colored quilt top started out after last week’s round 3:

And here is where it ended up after I added this week’s round 4:

I knew the top was due for a calmer round free of angles, giving the quilt a bit of an interim frame. I was also going to type here that it would give the eyes a place to rest, but can you really say that about assorted dancing vegetables on a yellow-orange field? Probably not. In its current state, the top now measures 32.5x44.5”. If you’d like to see how the SAHRR quilt tops are shaping up after four rounds (I highly recommend it), visit Wendy’s blog and linky party HERE. 

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Running in circles: New Accounts Payable system for the HOA. Drove across the valley one morning (in single-digit icy weather) to meet the accounting staff at our property management company and be introduced to the new program. Then conducted a meeting at our clubhouse same afternoon so we can train and transition the landscape volunteers to monitor and report issues - relating to pests and landscape - so I can unload the coordination of that onto someone else. It will happen, but now I am in charge of working with Bug Busters (our pest control company) too. That’s in addition to the Treasurer duties and writing the monthly newsletter. And did I mention that we have a legal seminar one afternoon in a couple weeks? Gotta know the governing statutes and where HOA responsibility ends and homeowner responsibilities start (or vice versa). It’s going to be a crazy year, and I’ve all but decided that I won’t run again next year for office. 

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That’s it. On Saturday (either today or tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this), I have Quilts for Kids, then on Sunday, Ruby and Cousin Kim come over for the Church of Bernina, which is what we call our sewing day. Heaven knows how sewing restores our souls!! Have a great week!! xo

Sewing the Blues

What a nice week! Not weather-wise, because it’s February. It’s cold and windy, rainy and snowy. But I got in a lot of fun sewing time, friend time and on Saturday both my sons and families will be over for an evening of Mexican food and fun. I bought some mini roses potted in cute ceramic ladybugs for granddaughter London (now age 15) and my daughter-in-law Kim. And chocolate too (naturally). 

So, let’s start off with this week’s round for the Stay At Home Round Robin. Our hostess for Round three this week was Gail, and she called STARS. This is where my quilt top was at the end of last week:

Last week’s progress

First I added another red stop border to separate this round from the spikey half-square triangles of the previous round. I decided to further lengthen the piece by adding a row to the top only. I sewed up my favorite Friendship Stars with flip corners because I love the pattern it gives. 

I know these photos look wonky. That’s because I’m in the (bad?) habit of pinning the four corners snugly and forgetting about pinning along the long sides. Really, it is not bowed. 

I will trim the spacers at the ends of the new row once I begin the next round. The top now measures 26.5 x 36.5” after three rounds. I’m really looking forward to the next round! If you’d like to see everyone’s creative progress so far, hop on over to Gail’s linky gathering for this round HERE. 

There was also a lot of therapeutic blue scrap sewing for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this week. First I worked on these two Weathervane blocks - one darker and the other with light and bright blue scraps. These fun blocks measure 12.5”, unfinished.

And then I pulled out some of my blue 1.5” strips to make these Switchplate blocks. They are so quick and easy. I’m making lots of these as I go with no particular plan as yet. 

Next week I’ll be showing the scrappy blue string blocks I’ve already started on. I’ve got 45 so far and hope to get another 15 out of my remaining blue scraps or I may have to cut a few from larger chunks. I like to donate them to Quilts for Kids in pinned batches of 15 because that fits nicely into their pre-cut quilt kits that quilters check out to sew into little quilts. 

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Bruce and I took some nice walks this week as weather permitted. On Wednesday I went out with some new friends (and some old friends) to lunch, and on Thursday it was cards (Hand and Foot) at the clubhouse. When Bruce and I went grocery shopping at our usual store today, they didn’t have any wheat rolls - for the second week - in the bakery section. No wheat dinner rolls, ciabatta rolls or whole grain hard rolls. Only white rolls. So we went to another store and it was the same thing there. What’s going on? Bewildered, Bruce and I joked that Trump must’ve banned everything but white bread in stores now. Gotta make jokes to survive this embarrassing nightmare that’s befallen our country. 

Have a good week, my friends!

Blue February, SAHRR Round 2 and a Finish

Well, we’ve made it through another week of cold weather. At least (or maybe unfortunately, depending on your perspective), we’re getting another abundant snow storm. A couple of my friends and I were planning to drive up to Park City (40 minutes in good weather), but the snowstorm has forced us to postpone our Girls Day Out for the time being. But there’s always plenty of sewing to keep me out of trouble (theoretically), so I’ll take solace in that!

Let’s start with the pink scrap quilt that I quilted this week. I had to make an emergency run to JoAnn Fabrics to buy some sewing machine needles before I started because I was down to my last 80/12 needle in the machine. And let me tell you, that place might as well shut their doors. Yes, I know they’ve filed for bankruptcy again; this time liquidation instead of reorganization. Our store had removed fully half the lighting. Every other fluorescent tube was gone. Try looking for needles sizes in a half-lit store with wonky 70-year-old eyes. Talk about a needle in a haystack. I did manage to buy two packs, but wow, their shelves already looked meagerly stocked, yet unopened cartons were everywhere. Obviously not enough staff. And their ridiculous sales still continue (Buy 2 get 3 free on thread). What numbskull thought *that* was a good business practice? No wonder they went bankrupt. I got my needles (and some backing fabric for my SAHRR quilt) and was glad to leave. 

Anyway, I finished quilting the scrappy pink Midnight at the Bubblegum Factory hodgepodge quilt. It finished at 39x43”. It was my last finish for Pink January in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

For February, Angela has called blue as the color of the month. I figured I should get started on my blocks, as February is a short month. I spent a pleasant afternoon on Thursday sorting all my blue scraps. There were a lot of fresh new blue scraps in there from various sources since the last time we worked on blue back in June of last year. 

The first scrappy blue blocks off the needle for February are these seven “Paint Chips”. That’s my working name for this block found on Pinterest without attribution. 

Because I have so many blue scraps, I ended up doing some color play to come up with these. It was rather fun - navy, bright, pastel, grayed-blues, etc.  They're generally alright, although I did mix up placement on a couple columns, and the camera doesn’t accurately reflect all the colors. But oh well.

I spent a couple afternoons playing with my Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR) quilt top. This is what the project looked like at the end of Round 1 last week: 

I hadn’t decided whether to add the chains on the side, preferring to wait until Round 2 was called by this week’s hostess, Anja. When Anja called half square triangles for Round Two, I sewed the chain on and added a little red stop border to bring the size up to 20.5 x 26.5”.  Here’s what it looked like at that point.

One of my goals for each round is to incorporate all four major colors (red, orange, yellow and purple) as well as the coordinating print fabric. Now this may change in future rounds, but for now that’s what I’m trying to do. So I made six half-square triangles of each color to embellish each corner, and cut squares and rectangles of the print fabric to incorporate. This is what I came up with.

OMG, I’m loving it so far! It measures 24.5 x 30.5” at this stage. Here are some close-ups. 

The camera keeps making the purple look like black, but I can assure you that in real life it’s a very rich royal purple. 

And that’s it for this week’s SAHRR Round 2. The linky party is HERE if you’d like to see how others are interpreting this week’s prompt. It’s a lot of fun to see what others are doing! I love the creative challenge that this round robin offers every year!!

I’ve been doing some string sewing here and there (mostly on Sundays) over the last couple weeks. This block idea came from my friend Nann. My blocks measure 8.5” when two (a right and a left) are sewn together. I’m trying to make ten blocks per month, and in January I sewed fifteen. Now, I dropped one on the floor and didn’t find it until after I snapped the photo. 

So, I already have a head start on February’s blocks! But no matter, once I sit down to sew strings, I can go on and on and on and…. I loves me some string blocks, and I think this is a stunning pattern. 

 

Round One

On Monday, the first round prompt for the Stay at Home Round Robin was announced by this week’s hostess, Kathleen. She challenged us to make a block that began with the first letter of our name. There were other alternatives if your first name initial didn’t correspond with a block. Well, with the letter “C” for Cathy, I had several choices. I finally decided on Churn Dash blocks. 

The center block is 12”, so I made the Churn Dash blocks 6” each. I decided to spread out their color placement around the center block. I also planned to add a chain column (another “C”) along the sides. I’m going to wait to attach the chains - or not - depending on what Round 2 brings. If I do add the chains, the piece will measure 18” across and 24” down after this round. I do want to work toward making this a rectangular quilt, and that means that somewhere in the process of building a quilt around a square block, that sometimes the top and bottom borders are wider than the side borders. The chain would lend itself beautifully to that…. Anyway, check out everyone’s interpretation of the challenge HERE.

I’m still working on some string blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I’ll show them next week. 

I did spend one afternoon basting these 5 quilt tops: three are the last of the Community Quilts, and 2 are mine. As I get them quilted up, I’ll share more about them.

For the most part, this week was taken up with a lot of HOA work around our community. Comcast is upgrading our cables and connections (long overdue) and a couple of us are liaising between the work crews and the homeowners, making appointments, emailing announcements and going door to door. It’s a lot of COLD work (temperatures have been frigid). But at least all the walking has really boosted my step count this week!

I’m going to publish this on Friday evening because we’ll be leaving early on Saturday morning to go up north a ways to watch our grandson Deacon compete in a swim meet. Bruce’s daughter Emily and her son Deacon (16) are down from Idaho because Deacon is in a regional swim meet. 

I’ll be linking up to :

Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Stay at Home RR

Winter Adventures

Let’s pretend that sewing and quilting are adventurous, OK? That’ll keep me honest for using the plural “adventures” in the title instead of the singular “adventure”.  

In my blogpost last Saturday I mentioned that my friend Ruby and I were going over to her sister Cathy’s house to learn to load and operate their new longarm machine, and indeed we did just that. I hope there’s not going to be a quiz, because this pea brain will take more than one session to “learn” how to operate it! But I’m pretty confident about loading it now, and I at least understood what each step we took was doing and how it fit into the whole process (like marking the beginning and ending of each row). The machine had some bothersome quirks, and the woman who was training us said that those little quirks were not acceptable. It turns out that the manufacturer replaced the whole machine this week (well, the whole computer and arm). Aaaanyway, I’m still relying on my own machine for quilting my smaller donation quilts, but I look forward to another longarm training session soon.

The real adventure this week came in the form of a day trip with my friend Ruby up to Crystal Hot Springs in Honeyville, Utah. It’s an hour drive north of us, north of Ogden and Tremonton. The Hot Springs have been there forever. In fact, the information placards said the springs had been used and enjoyed by over 450 generations of Native Americans before the white settlers came along.

According to the following placard, Crystal Hot Springs has the highest mineral concentration of any place on earth.  I hope the information in the sign is readable - if you care to read it. 

Here are some (poor) pictures of some of the pools. It was a cloudy day, but that didn’t dampen our spirits. 

The Springs open right at noon, which was when we got there. The crowds grew as the afternoon developed and it got downright busy once school let out. That’s when we went on our way and had a nice lunch/dinner combo ar a locally renowned restaurant, Maddock’s.

A single visit to the Hot Springs is $18 per person, but you can buy a 10-visit pass (good for 2 years) for $50. Bruce is anxious to try it, so we’ll be buying that pass, you can bet on it!

So that was my non-sewing adventure, and we can turn to my Adventures in Scrap Wrangling next!

For Pink January, I sewed some string blocks (6.5”)

And some crumb blocks (also 6.5”). 

I finished sewing the pink Midnight at the Bubblegum Factory quilt top together. It will get basted and quilted in the coming week - at least, that’s the plan - and I should be able to show it next week. But this week I did finish up another donated quilt top into a quilted and bound little number. 

I used a backing that Jo (Jo’s Country Junction blog) sent me for these community quilts. I’m not crazy about (in fact, I greatly dislike) the light backing with the dark, bright front, but it’s all I had that would work. The binding is the folded-over backing, not a great look in this instance. At least the thread tension was good so that the light bobbin thread and darker front quilting thread played nicely together. 

I’ll be taking this quilt (plus the 13 others I’ve finished since Thanksgiving) to Quilts for Kids this morning.

Back in my post of December 21, I talked about a Halloween quilt I’m going to make this year; sixteen blocks (12” each, finished size) surrounding a haunted house panel. I’ll be doing 2 blocks each month for 8 months, giving me all of September to sew it together and custom quilt it. Here are my first two blocks for January.

I was a little disappointed that the above block didn’t have better contrast between the oranges. But it will remain as is. The following block is actually a lot like the first one, at least with general layout and component sizes. I’ll be using Halloween fabrics in oranges, purples, black and gray - the colors of the panel. I’ve already cut out and kitted up the two blocks for February, so this project is on track! I’ll share more about it as the year progresses. 

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Today, Saturday, Cousin Kim is coming over and Bruce and I will take her to lunch at this cute little cafe and gift shop nearby. Then she’ll be giving us haircuts (she’s a licensed cosmetologist). My hair needs 2-3 inches chopped off to restore its “perkiness”. Kim will be back over on Sunday to sew (Church of Bernina, LOL) with Ruby and me. The adventures never end here at Chez Kizerian.

Oh! My amaryllis finally opened this week! It has FOUR blossoms! 

And you can see the swelling of a bloom-to-be on the adjacent stalk. What a treat!

The Stay at Home Round Robin actually begins on Monday with our first round design/motif assignment. That will give me several days to work on it before next week’s RSC and SAHRR post. 

Have a great week. Linking up to Scrappy Saturday.

Pink Blocks, Stay at Home RR, and Some Finishes

I’ve been continuing to finish up some of my “well-aged” quilt tops into quilts. When I say that they’re mine, what I really mean is that they were sent to me as tops to add backing and batting, and then to quilt and bind. I then get to donate them to my favorite charity, Quilts for Kids. The tops were actually made by a group of ladies in Cresco, Iowa and sent to me by Jo Kramer of Jo’s Country Junction blog. This week, I finished up three more. 

This first one is a “gorilla superhero” themed little number. It really is rather cute in person. 

The backing is bits of an old wide backing and a red strip  to add width. It was quilted with a basic stipple. 

Next up was another Happy Block top that was quilted in loops (stipple and loops, my two go-to motifs for quilting charity quilts because they’re easy and fast). 

The backing was cobbled together from semi-harmonious chunks in my stash. I’m trying hard to make do and destash at the same time. 

The third finish was this bright little number. Again, it was quilted in a stipple. The thread I was using on this kept breaking, and I tried everything to fix it - clean the machine, re-thread the machine, switch threads,. Nothing worked until I put in a fresh new needle, and then everything was fine. I’m going to have to remember to change needles more frequently!! 

The backing was a single piece gifted to me by my friend Wanda. 

There is just one more quilt from this pile (already basted) for me to quilt. Following that, there are three quilt tops from a Susan L that I’ll baste and quilt - fully one year behind when I originally intended to do them, in January of 2024. But 2024 was a doozy of a year for us, with packing and moving and remodeling, and Bruce being diagnosed with CLL (leukemia). It wasn’t really until November that I finally felt I could get my head above water, so to speak. 

And then, after all my outside quilting commitments are complete, I can finally resume work on my backlog of RSC quilt tops, about 6 or 7 of them.

I also worked on some Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC) blocks. I did two flying geese blocks with pink and scrappy black backgrounds. The blocks are 6.5”, unfinished.

The second set of blocks are Switchplates, made with 1.5” strips. These are just way too much fun to sew!! I found it hard to stop! 

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The annual Stay at Home Round Robin is coming!! The first post, where everyone will share their beginning block, will go live on Monday. 

In searching my orphan blocks, I found this 12.5” Card Trick block that was given to me several years ago in some scrap haul (probably from Quilts for Kids). I don’t mind the wild colors, but I thought they would be hard to work cooperatively with in a smallish quilt - because the finished quilt will eventually go back to QFK, and therefore it will be a kid-sized quilt.

So I hunted my stash for ideas, and found this 1-yard piece of fabric (below) that had the purple, orange and yellow, but contained red as a fourth color instead of green. So, I did what any good quilter would do and unpicked enough of the original block to allow me to substitute red for the green. Much better! 

So now, I’m ready to get sewing. I’ll be linking up once the introductory post goes live on Monday. Today! Click HERE to see all our starting blocks. If you’d like to find out more about the SAHRR and even possibly join us, check it out HERE. 

That’s it for now. My friend Ruby is picking me up in a little while and we’re going over to her sister’s house (her name is also Cathy). Ruby and Cathy bought a Grace Q’nique long-arm machine. It’s been set up for awhile and today we will be getting a private class from The Grace Company on how to load quilts, select, scale and program the quilting patterns, etc. We’re so excited! 

Pink January

Here we are in 2025! Are you ready to begin another year of fun and games, sewing scraps and eating too much? ………….. Well, I’m not either. Except the sewing scraps part. And maybe the fun and games, but that will likely have to wait until spring. Right now, our first appreciable snow of the season is falling outside, I’m curled up with a cup of coffee and a fire in  the fireplace. The cats are fed and curling up for their morning naps. Life is good. 

This week I made a good start on my pink scraps, the color that Angela called for January for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

First, I started with the Weathervane block, just one in pink. It’s a 12” (finished) block, so for the year I’ll make either 12 total (3x4 layout with sashing and borders) or 20 (4x5 layout without sashing). We’ll see.

And then I did these “paint chip” blocks with 2.5” squares and some 2.5x4.5” rectangles. Yeah, that bottom right one is a hot mess. It deserves a re-do or the trashcan… 

My pink scraps are voluminous enough that I realized a few RSC blocks were not going to make a significant-enough dent in them . So I got a wild hair to lay waste to them in one fell swoop. The in-process result is this monstrosity you see below. It’s partly pinned, partly sewn, and definitely a messy work in progress. Crumb blocks, strips, chunks and stripes. Oh my! Yes, it needs work.  It reminds me of the old “creature” quilts I used to do. But I think I’ll call this one Nightmare at the Bubblegum Factory (cousin to Creature from the Bubblegum Factory). 

The size of this one will be limited by the pre-cut batting I have from Quilts for Kids. That reminds me - I need to order a new roll of batting. But that won’t happen until I baste and quilt all the donation quilts that are drumming their fingers, waiting to be finished when my Bernina returns from her annual spa visit. 

In the meantime, impatient quilt tops notwithstanding, I’ll be continuing this week with more pink scrappy sewing. What’s in store for your week?