Pedal to the Metal

It’s been a busy week of sewing for me as I ramp up to finish at least four good-sized quilts by mid-December. I also finished sewing up all my remaining selvages, which kinda-sorta just happened. I had gone through all my selvages and added a large bag of them to Cynthia Brunz’s selvage giveaway for last month’s Quilty Orphan Adoption. (And speaking of that, I drew another name - Karen T. - for the other quilt pieces I was giving away. We got all the particulars arranged and they’re on their way to her now). 

But getting back to the selvages, I sewed up all the yellow and gold ones to make 10 half hexagon blocks. The leftovers that were too narrow were sewn into columns of varying widths. I just tried to keep them as wide as possible for now.  That was my start on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month for October. I’m linking up to Scrappy Saturday at Angela’s blog. 

After that, I thought I would tackle the brown selvages since there weren’t too many. But many of them were really long, so it made 15 half hexies and a couple pieced columns.

On Monday, I decided to keep going with the gray selvages. Seven half hexies and two little columns.

Well, that hardly took any time, so it was on to my black selvages.  8 half hexies and a small column.

Where there are black selvages, there are most certainly white and black selvages. Yeah. A LOT of white and black selvages.....  Yawn. These were pretty boring. But wow did they ever clear out my selvage storage! The result was 12 half hexies and two little pieced columns.  I think that did it for Monday.

But on Tuesday, all I had left were the multi-colored selvages.  By golly, I was going to empty that selvage bin if it killed me.  It didn’t. I made THIS MANY:

OK, OK, I’ll count them.... 37. And the smaller bits sewn into the three columns below.

If you heard me whooping and hollering on Tuesday, it was because I was either doing the No More Selvages Happy Dance or I was watching the Un-Presidential “Debate”.  No, I’m not going any further with that. 

The selvages are all gone. But it will be 2021 before I start planning and figuring out how to sew them all together. My guess is that I have enough for at least two quilts - and three or more if I combine them with regular fabric. Stay tuned for that.

On Wednesday, I realized I had enough scraps in my yellow bin to make two Scraptastic Star blocks, so I did just that. Here’s the yellow one:

And here’s the gold one.

That brings me up to the 12 blocks I needed for a complete quilt. Here they are slapped up on the design wall. They will be sewn together after all the Christmas obligations are done. The blocks aren’t trimmed up yet - I prefer to wait until just before sewing them together. 

My personal goal for September was to finish the Tyrol quilt top, which I accomplished on the 30th. Whew! I forgot to link up to the One Monthly Goal linky party, but I still accomplished my goal, which is the point. Here’s the Tyrol top.

I just LOVE it! 

Yesterday I sewed up the backing for Tyrol. My first and primary order of business today is to get everything pressed, layered and basted. The hardest part for me will be narrowing down then deciding on a quilting design (and practicing it on a practice piece before committing to the quilt). I’m going to try to force myself to stretch a bit with this. Wish me luck. I don’t want to have to come back next week and report that I chickened out and did my default loops or stipple!