The Cat Days of Summer

We don’t do Dog Days of Summer here at Chez Kizerian because we have cats. Or, more accurately, they have us. Alfalfa and Darla, our dear Little Rascals, run a tight ship around here. In fact, I’m probably due for a reprimand for posting a blurry picture of Darla. Sorry ‘bout that!

So, we just stay indoors where it’s cool. Every other morning we venture out to the vegetable garden to pick what’s ripe. We just picked the last of the lettuce. Now we’re into yellow squash, green beans and carrots. Lots of carrots. Family and neighbors are getting our overages, although come fall we will find a cold place to store the remaining carrots and potatoes. For now, we are eating mainly stir-fry dinners and main dish salads. Once the tomatoes ripen, we’ll add (turkey) BLTs to the rotation. Tonight we’re going to Ryan’s house (my older son) to visit with the family and pawn off lots of carrots there, LOL. He’s making ham fried rice for dinner with a recipe he got from his Uncle Jeff (my former BIL) while visiting him last summer in Hawaii.  Ryan has turned into a very good cook and does most of the meal preparation for his family. It’s just him, Kim and Lauren, who is going into her junior year of high school. Their son Easton is attending college at Utah State U in Logan. When Easton graduates next year, he’s been officially accepted into the US Navy and their nuclear engineering program (on submarines). He’s excited. We’re proud, but glad it’s him and not us! LOL

Ok, so we’ve covered cats, vegetables and family, so let’s move on to the quilty progress, shall we? I’ll be linking up to Scrappy Saturday at Angela’s blog to share the dark blue things I’ve sewn this week.

I guess I should start off by updating last week’s lamentations about my sewing machine acting up while trying to quilt a friend’s table runner.  I had 95% of the quilting on the tablerunner completed when my machine stopped cooperating, skipping stitches. I cleaned it, put in a new needle, etc etc. After trying everything I could think of, I finally increased the needle size from a 12 to a 14. All the problems went away for the last two motifs I quilted. I don’t understand why everything was just fine until the finish line was in sight, but at least it’s done. Now the size 12 needle is back in the machine, and she is purring away. 

So, this week, I tackled my blue strings. I love sewing strings, which is probably why I make myself finish most of my other monthly blocks before playing with them. This month’s yield was 20 dark blue string blocks (6.5” unfinished).

Since I had plenty of African fabric in dark blues, I was able to sew up six more International Sisters blocks for the various wallhangings I’m making with these blocks. In fact, I’ll be putting together another 2-sided wall hanging in August for Harambe Humanitarian fundraising purposes. It will be the third of about 7-8 that I’ll eventually make. 

Sorry the picture seems so dark. I’m afraid if I increase the exposure any more, it will wash it out. My screens aren’t always accurate, and my iPhone and its operator (me, LOL) aren’t the best photographers. But you get the idea.

With those finished, I was able to move my remaining blue blocks from the Block Orphanage, as well as some interesting scraps, onto the design board.  Here we have the beginnings of the July blue Creature quilt.  I’m combining all my blues, light, bright and dark, into one quilt. 

I want to finish this by month end (one week!), so it will be pedal to the metal in the studio this week.  My first priority, however, is to finish Pineapples 2, which is my OMG (One Monthly Goal) for July. The quilt top is assembled, basted and in the process of being quilted. Once I’m done with the ditch quilting on it, It’ll probably do a cross-hatch in the pineapple squares and some other as-yet-undecided treatment in the larger white spacer squares.

Oh, and I do have a small finish to share this week. This is just a cute little panel quilt that I added borders to, then quilted up for Quilts for Kids. We were gifted several hundred panels at the end of last year, and we’re hoping to get through them to make donation quilts for kids in hospitals this year. Simple finishes are the name of the game.

The wavy bottom is because only the top portion is pinned to the design board; the last few inches just hang down. It’s square, I promise. My former quilt holder-upper is no longer available to hold up quilts since his arm was amputated. That means the “glamour” shots are anything but. But I digress.....  The quilt (unnamed) measures 38x53” and once again, will go to Quilts for Kids.

Let’s see, what else? Umm ... Oh! Zipper blocks!!  How could I forget?  Ten more this week.

I think I’m up to about 57 completed now. The finished size of the eventual quilt is undecided, but it will either be 60x72 (requiring 80 blocks) or 66x81” (99 blocks). I’m leaning toward the larger size because these are so fun. We’ll see.

One evening this week I got sidetracked by a request from Pattern Jam. I have a couple patterns there that are pretty popular. Now that Pattern Jam is under new ownership, they are trying to fix some of the back end (behind the scenes) issues, one of which was a faulty algorithm for calculating the fabric cutting requirements and directions for quilts.  So I had a request from the management to provide those for this quilt pattern for several people who had asked.

There are two blocks in this quilt, and each one appears 24 times for a total of 48 blocks. The faulty cutting instructions called for cutting 120 (REALLY??) 6.5” white background squares when only 24 were needed. And then it gave some yardage requirements for “quarter square triangles”. Wha’???? There ARE NO QST’s in this! So, I redid the yardage requirements and gave some basic directions. 

Now I want to go back and create a smaller version of this quilt based on 2.5” squares instead of the 3.5” squares of this version. Either way, it would be a fun and easy quilt to do for a patriotic quilt, or a Christmas quilt in different colors. Do you ever play with Pattern Jam? It’s a free website, and I’ve used it a lot to help me play with design. Plus there is a lot of eye candy and ideas for quilt layouts in their main “public” stream. 

That’s about it from here. Time to go quilt some pineapples! Have a great week, friends.