Back in the Pink - Three Finishes

So, for all my moping and dark moodiness last week (I figure we’re all allowed that every now and then, especially when there’s been an attempted insurrection on the Capitol), I’m much more cheerful this week. I finally decided that walks in the all-too-rare winter sunshine, plus more fruits and veggies (and less comfort food), along with a good dose of “pull up your Big Girl panties, girlfriend” self talk would do the trick. And it did. Everything isn’t all roses and rainbows, but there sure is a lot of pink and teddy bears, bunnies and happy scraps in this week’s sewing effort. So, I’ll be joining up with the sewists of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge’s Scrappy Saturday to share my pink progress.

The first thing that happened was the quilting and binding of this pink sock monkey quilt.

Pink Sock Monkeys, like all the quilts I’m showing today, are pink scrap quilts headed to our local chapter (Salt Lake City) of Quilts for Kids. It was quilted in a large stipple, backed with more pink monkey fabric and bound with a pink scrap. It measures 42.5x47”,

Last week I showed the finished flimsy (top) of this teddy bear and bunny top along with some stars. This week it too was quilted and bound.

Bears and Buns (hehe) was quilted with a stipple again and finished at 41x48”. The binding is just folded over from the backing. The backing is a pink and white stripe that looks great as binding at the top and bottom, but not so great on the sides. Oh well.  

Since these are relatively small child-sized quilts I tend to baste, quilt and bind them in groups. The third quilt finished this week was the one below with Raggedy Ann and Andy. I had a bit of a fussy time with the companion fabrics. Everything my stash that “matched” up close did not look good from a few feet away. It’s one of those cool pink prints where I couldn’t pull out the pink floral elements, the blue of Andy’s pants, or the red stripes of their socks. It just looked jarring (making the red in the sock monkey quilt above look tame by comparison). So, I stuck with pinks. I guess that’s why companion prints are so popular.

The whiteish print with large pink polka dots is a Tula Pink fabric from her Tabby Road collection. The problem is that it was printed REALLY off-kilter, which I learned when I cut the fabric for width-of-fabric strips between the darker pink sashing. Um.... it looked nauseating. So, Plan B was to cut them up into 6.5” blocks so I could straighten them up (much better!) and add some unobtrusive yet sorta-matching pinks. It worked well enough. 

This one was backed with the same striped pink fabric and quilted with hearts and loops to echo the hearts in the print.  It finished at 40.5x46.5”.

There are two more quilts that will be made from pink scraps this month. Right now they’re either a flimsy or just pinned on the design board.  Here’s the first one - the flimsy. It consists of 4.5” squares (except the two center blocks which were in the Orphanage and unused in last year’s Creature From the Bubblegum Factory quilt. 

And then finally, I had a lot of 6.5” (unfinished) string blocks and a few other 6” blocks. But I needed a few more, so with all the scraps and strips from the above quilts, I was able to sew up six more string blocks and added them to the mix. This is what I’ve got up on the design board for now.

There are 9 total “other” blocks mixed in - the four corners, then three 4-patches, a square in square of HSTs, and a plain 6” patch. After this, I don’t know if I’ll even have enough crumbs left over to do any crumb blocks! However, I do have some Wishing Ring blocks planned, and I made the first one.

The fabric is a rose print that I’ve had for 15-16 years, and I love it. I’m calling it pink, but it has green, yellow and pale peach areas as well. The cut of fabric that I have will make about 12 of these blocks (made of 2.5” squares, so it will finish at 10”). I’ll need other soft colors to go along with it, so as we get to yellows or peaches or pale greens or whatever, I’ll make companion blocks. No specific plan yet other than to just keep making these and see where it goes....

I still plan to make a couple pink (or pink and red) placemats for Valentine's Day for Bruce and I to go along with Joy’s Table Scraps Challenge.  I’m thinking of participating in the SAHRR (Stay at Home Round Robin), using this old orphan block as my center:

And when I say that I’m thinking about it, it means that in my more lucid moments I will definitely NOT be playing along. But the crazy moments seem to outnumber the rational ones these days, and I’m thinking “why not?”. It’s not like I have anything else to do! hahahahaha.  So, we’ll see. This may be the first and last you hear about it. Or the clue for the first round of blocks may just suck me in even deeper.... and it will be a good way to get rid of some of those red/green/orange Bonnie and Camille cuts I have that don’t play well with too many other things....

And there is one more sew-along having to do with linens and hankies that I’ve started on (very underwhelming start, I might add). I may or may not continue on that at the present time, although it should be a higher priority than the one listed above. But we’ll see how much I can get done of all the other stuff in the second half of the month. Am I getting tired of pink yet? Um, you could say that. But looking on the bright side, I am no longer swimming in pink scraps!!

Have a great (and peaceful and healthy) week, friends!