The Most Wonderful Squirrel of the Year

The title of this post was going to be The Most Wonderful TIME of the year, because with winter in full swing and Christmas and year-end bearing down (and shopping mostly done), I have lots of time and determination to play in my sewing studio for hours and hours each day. My time is spent quilting this, basting that, sorting these scraps, sewing those strings, all to Christmas songs and other favorite music. The days are speeding by. Anyway, last week I said that my squirrels (off-on-a-tangent projects) were having squirrels. This week I think I’ve even ushered in another whole generation of squirrels (grand-squirrels?). We’ll get to that momentarily.

First, I have an actual finish to show you - one of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects for 2020 is a finish!! I’ll be sharing this on Scrappy Saturday. Here is Scraptastic Stars.

Scraptastic Stars finished at 48.5x64.5”. It’s quilted with small, viney loops and is labeled and ready for Quilts for Kids. 

I had hoped to get a couple more quilts tops layered together this week, but that didn’t happen. I did, however, finish sewing the quilt top for my son Ryan and got the backing prepped, too. Kim and I will baste it on Sunday.

It has been trimmed since this picture. I sure wish the colors photographed more accurately. Hopefully once it’s finished, we can get a good outdoor picture of it. But it’s huge - about about 75 x 85”, so I don’t know how one person can hold it up. I’ll worry about that later, though.

As usual (lately), I spent time working on string blocks. This week I made 27 of the multi-colored string blocks (below). I also sewed some special string blocks for my grand-squirrel project, and then focused on using up my brown strings for the RSC dark neutrals month. Here are the string blocks.

There are 19 brown string blocks, which will be added to my strings blocks for future use as alternate blocks in scrappy Quilts For Kids (QFK) projects. 

Ok, NOW we can talk about the grand-squirrel project. So, as if I didn’t have enough ongoing must-finish and should-finish projects, I started another project this week. I was itching to pare down that brown scrap drawer, and ran across some wonderful color inspiration photos online.  So I sketched out some scrap-friendly blocks in a simple row design and hunted my scraps and stash for the appropriate colors. 

First up was making 14 of these 6.5” strip blocks, each with a central (more or less) teal strip surrounded by some old brown and blue polka dot strips. Then the rest of the block was filled in with other warm brown strips. 

After those, I used scraps to make rail fence blocks, snowballs, nine-patches, checkerboards and friendship star (variation) blocks. Alfie was Supervisor of the Day, and dropped by while I was cutting half-square triangles for the friendship stars. 

I guess he wasn’t sure if things were up to standard, so he had to peer closer...

And then, apparently not satisfaied with the way I was doing it, decided to cut them himself....

So, together we got them cut and I got them sewn. Here is the brown (and blue and molten gold) quilt so far. There will be a final gold strip across the top once it’s all sewn together.  

As it appears above, it’s just half sewn and half pinned. I think the confetti dots ombre gold fabric gives it a real lit-from-within look, and I love it. At least, it’s not bad for a “brown” quilt! It should finish at about 42x50”. I’ll show a finished picture next week. What do you think? 

And finally, a picture of Bruce with his NEW guitar-playing prosthetic. The one I showed last month was his “quick-and-dirty” (homemade) version while the prosthetist was finalizing this real carbon fiber arm. Bruce helped in the design of the arm because he was a medical engineer who worked for Symbion and Robert Jarvik on the artificial heart and the Utah artificial arm.  Who would’ve thought that his experience would end up coming in handy for himself? Anyway, the playing arm is lighter and gives Bruce much easier control. He can even pick notes, not just strum. He’ll never be a Bela Fleck, but he is really amazing!!

Have a great week!