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?

End of Year Wrap-up

Did you have a Merry Christmas? Ours was lovely. We spent Christmas Eve at home, just the two of us, noshing on a simple charcuterie platter.

Our simple but healthy Christmas Eve “feast”

On Christmas Day we went to my son Ryan and daughter-in-law Kim’s house. Both my sons were there, but my daughter and her boyfriend live in Washington so they weren’t able to attend. Kim’s family, minus one sibling and family were there too. This year, even my ex-husband Scott and his wife Cally joined in. It was a very pleasant evening, with lots of good food, good company and gift exchanging. There were 20 of us all together. 

Last Saturday I decided to spend the day basting quilts. For the first time, I spread everything out on our huge kitchen island to pin baste. I also brought out my ironing board to iron things as I went along. While listening to a Christmas music channel, I spent the afternoon basting six quilts. What a game changer the island is! It’s 53” wide and 80-some inches long, so it was plenty large to accommodate the quilts. And its counter height made pinning things easy without having to bend over. It was such a delightful afternoon! 

Rather than show every basted quilt in an individual photo, I made a collage.

And of those six, I got two of them finished, plus one I had already basted the previous week. First up is my Scrappy Stars quilt, a Rainbow Scrap Challenge project for this year. It finished at 47x59”.

Here’s the backing. It’s already been labeled to donate to Quilts for Kids. 

Next up was this scrappy column quilt at 39x50”. 

And finally, this Community Quilt, one of 5 that I have basted and would love to have quilted and bound for our mid-January Quilts for Kids workshop. This “Community Quilt” was made by quilters in Iowa and sent as a top for me to quilt and donate. I’ve had it (and four of its brethren from the above collage picture) for over a year and feel a pressing need to get these finished and finally donated. 

This is a small quilt, measuring only 33.5x41”.

I’ve got a few more days before year end, so I’m hoping to get them all done and into my meager count of finished quilts for 2024. I’ll report back next week with my final total, or you can check my 2024-2025 Quilts page (the tab is just under the blog header). 

My Bernina is in the shop for her annual “spa treatment”, so any quilting I do will be on my Brother back-up machine. That means it’ll have to be straight-line or serpentine stitching with a walking foot. But that’s OK. Yesterday afternoon I used the Brother to stitch up the year’s batting scraps into four large and one small Frankenbatt, and he did not let me down!

Have a nice and safe New Year’s Eve and Day. We’ll see you back here in January!!

Ready for Christmas and 2025

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, the shopping and wrapping and baking are all done. I even spent yesterday afternoon walking around delivering gifts (mostly homemade biscotti) to  friends around our HOA community. It was a beautiful afternoon and it felt so good to be outdoors!

I was able to finish up three quilts this week from tops I had sewn earlier in the year. This first one was sewn (well, the top was) way back in January when our Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month was green. Here it is, eleven months later, finally a finish! Yep, moving and remodeling sure messed up my sewing rhythm. But it’s done before the end of the year!

I quilted it in a simple stipple and it finished at 42x48”. The backing is an adorable woodland print I picked up at Hancock’s of Paducah online a couple years ago. They have such great prices and selections - check out their $4.99 and $5.99 sale fabrics!

Then I quilted this pink and white string top sewn in May. Same size - 42x48”, stipple quilted. 

For the backing I used most of the last of this adorable cherry blossom print I picked up at an estate sale several years ago. 

And then it was this bright checkerboard kids quilt I sewed in October or November. I just cross-hatched it. The backing is a really old print that I hate and am glad to be rid of. 

All three of these little quilts will be going to Quilts for Kids in January. 

I have two more that I want to quilt between now and Christmas. my Bernina goes in for her annual “spa treatment” the day after Christmas. For the week or so that it will be away from home, I’ll use my backup Brother machine and do my annual Frankenbatting marathon - sewing together the strips and large chunks of batting I’ve accumulated during the year to make useable batts. I’m also hoping to baste about 5-8 tops that have been donated to me over the last year (for Quilts for Kids) so I can just quilt them as the opportunity arises. Those little activities will help clear out some of the piles around my sewing room and make way for me to hit the ground running in January!

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Here’s a random picture, of no particular significance other than I wanted to show that I finally got pictures hung on the wall of our little den area off the kitchen/dining. I never did find anything I liked to use as the coffee table holiday centerpiece. So I’ll just wait until the holiday decorations are put away and figure something out then. 

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So, I mentioned that I baked biscotti this year. After two half days and one almost-full day of baking, I completed 8 batches of biscotti, two batches of four different flavors.

Top: Vanilla Cinnamon with icing and sprinkles
Bottom: Classic Almond

Top: Lemon with Lemon Drizzle
Bottom: Chocolate Dipped Chocolate Walnut

And, all together: 

I’ll be taking lots to our family Christmas gathering at my son and daughter-in-law’s house on Christmas Day. 

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I have my 2025 Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks and scrap projects figured out for 2025. I had hoped to make myself a Halloween quilt this year, but other priorities popped up. I only decorate for fall, not for Halloween. Fall decorations go up in September and come down after Thanksgiving. Also, I have several fall quilts, but have never made a Halloween quilt. So that will be happening in 2025. I have a great haunted house panel that I bought at Missouri Star Quilt Co. about 3 years ago. I’ll surround the panel with 12” blocks - 16 of them. My plan is to sew 2 Halloween blocks per month. I have picked out the block patterns I want to use, including bats in all four corners. That will take me through August to finish the blocks. Then I can use September to sew it all together, quilt and bind it, and I’ll have a Halloween quilt by October!

And then - and I’m really impressed with myself (buffs nails on shoulder) - I even kitted up two of the blocks so I’m ready for January’s sewing!

And finally, here are the blocks I’ve settled on for my 2025 Rainbow Scrap Challenge monthly blocks.

These are pictures I saved from the internet. I can tell you that our dear friend Cathy L (Sane and Crazy Blog) is the inspiring quilter from whom I am flagrantly copying the flying geese with black background (left bottom in photo above) and the “switchplate” blocks using 1.5” scraps (top left). 

The bottom right block is the classic Weatherpane Block, and the top right one I pinned on Pinterest (no source info available). I call it Paint Chips, and it will use up some of my 2.5” squares.

So, with those four blocks I’ve chosen, I can make dents in 1.5”, 2.5”, and 4+” size scraps, as well as miscellaneous black pieces for the flying geese and miscellaneous light neutrals for the Switchplates and Paint Chips.  Win win!

Have a wonderful Christmas or Hanukkah (my daughter and family celebrate both). Be safe and may you spend the holidays with the ones you love.

‘Tis the Season to be Jolly

….. and I’m trying to fake it until I make it! Some sunshine would go a long way towards being jolly, and so would a little self control when it comes to chocolate. But this too shall pass, so I’m rolling with it and keeping busy. 

All in all, it was a fun and productive week. I’m just going to talk about all the things in the order that Blogger deigns to upload my photos, so let’s buckle up!

What a shock, I do believe they maintained their chronological order!

Last week, I may have mentioned that several of us women in the condo community decorated the clubhouse. I didn’t take pictures at the time, but on Monday morning of this week I was back there for a quick HOA Board meeting for us to decide the new responsibilities of each board member. (I’m going to be the Treasurer). Anyway, here are some photos I snapped of the clubhouse decor so we have references of what-goes-where for future years. 

Clubhouse fireplace and mantel

Christmas Tree and reflection of Karen and Carol working on hanging more decorations 

Side table in conference area

On Monday and Tuesday, I sewed more zipper pouches, adding six instead of just five to the total. 

Here are all thirteen that I made this year. 

One evening my Weight Watcher friends and I got together for our monthly card game (Hand and Foot). We try to make our December meeting a light potluck and inexpensive gift exchange. This year, my contribution to the buffet was this fruity Christmas tree. I snapped a photo of it in my kitchen before I wrapped it and carted it off just in case it didn’t survive the ten minute car trip (but it did). 

And here are Ruby, Annette and Ellie at the buffet at our friend Lory’s house. Not shown: Lory, Lisa, Linda and Shauna. We all had fun, and that’s where a lot of the zip pouches were given, each person choosing their favorite. In return, I got hand soaps, a Christmas mug, socks, an amaryllis bulb, and more. 

Later in the week, I spent an afternoon basting kid quilt tops to their backings. Some are more recent quilt top finishes, but one dates back to the beginning of the year before we moved from the house to the condo. I really want to get them finished before year end. 

A green scrappy top from January

Recently finished Bright Blocks

An RSC2024 scrappy quilt top finished in November

Pink and light neutral string top constructed in May

My plan is to focus on quilting up those four tops ASAP. I don’t have any parties or gatherings after Monday next week, so my hope is to get them done, labeled and photographed to show here on the blog next week.

There was one quilty finish this week for my friend Maureen. This panel quilt finished at 27.5x34”. I quilted it in wavy lines for a watery effect. Maureen loves cranes, the color green, and Japanese art in general. 

It can be used as a table topper or wall hanging (I added hanging tabs on back). I will also be giving her a matching zipper pouch filled with biscotti. That’s the biscotti I plan to start baking this afternoon after we get home from the Community Christmas Brunch at the clubhouse. I was going to make another fruity Christmas tree to take to the Brunch, but it will be a hastily-assembled fruit salad in a bowl instead. 

Have a fun and festive week as we head toward Christmas! May you enjoy every moment of it!

Linking to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.