Ready For a New Color

It’s only a few days until the new color for March is announced by Angela, our Rainbow Scrap Challenge hostess. I can’t wait! I’ve sewed almost my aqua scraps and even made cuts into fat quarters, using two for placemat backs - I’ll show you later in this post. 

One day this week we took a load of stuff to the thrift store. I also wanted to go in to see if I could find any decent fabric or sheets to use as quilt backings. I did OK - found a denim-look queen top sheet and a pale green queen top sheet. The store had most of the fabric pieces bagged and hanging on hooks in the Domestics. I found one package for $2.99 (less a 20% senior discount and less another 20% discount for donating). It had 3 pieces of cute aqua cotton fabrics measuring roughly 21” by WOF (width of fabric). The second pack I picked up was $3.99 less those same two discounts, and had two cute prints (navy/pinks and gray/pink/green) that measured over 1.5 yards. Good score!

First, let me show you how the quilt top for the Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR) finished up. Here is the flimsy before starting this week’s round. It measured 40.5 x 48.5"

This week’s hostess, Chris, called the classic Shoofly block for this final round. I was very happy with that because I’ve only ever done a handful of those, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you when. Anyway, I first added a small stop border on the outside of last week’s appliqué border. That made the top dimensions all wonky for 6” shoofly blocks on the long sides.  Also, I over-estimated how much the color would separate the individual shoofly blocks from each other. Some look like they run together color-wise. I should’ve made fewer blocks and used spacers between them. It would’ve been more dramatic with the black and then they could’ve gone all the way around. But I am NOT ripping them out and re-doing it. 

Bruce loves it, and that’s what’s important. I’m totally disappointed in myself for blowing the finish when up to now it was going so (forgive the pun) “swimmingly”.  On the positive side, I learned a lesson about spacing these blocks AND I had mostly excellent points on the blocks. Some of those points will get eaten up by the black binding, but I’m done. I’m not going to sew another little black border on it just to preserve the points that no one will notice anyway. So, this quilt now measures 55x62”, which is a good size for Bruce to sit under in his recliner. I was going to have it custom quilted, but I’m throwing in the towel on that, too. I’ll just hack my way through it. *sigh*

I’m linking up to the SAHRR weekly post for this final sixth round at ChrisKnits. I invite you to drop by and see all the lovely quilt tops that have been created! We will have a final finished quilt parade on March 21 (ish), but I’ll link up to show you when the time comes. 

I still had some aqua blocks to finish up for the RSC this week.  These bow tie blocks are a new start for me this month. When you have lots of 2.5” squares, make bow ties!

I also sewed up all my aqua/teal crumbs and made them into 6.5” blocks. I made 10 of those and then added two aqua orphan blocks. They made two delightful placemats at 12x18” each. 

Two placemats - front

Two placemats - back

I’m linking up with Joy and friends for the Table Scraps monthly linkup. Come check it out!

And to round out the month, I finished up the last two little Quilts for Kids for February. These are always made from donated scraps. This first one I’m calling Eighties Throwback because of the colors. It measures 40x46”. The backing is the last (thank goodness!) of a text print I had.

And then I had to put together my monthly strings quilt in hopes of beating that pile of string blocks down. I did sew up any aqua strings I had on hand into blocks, so there were 7 of them added this month. But this quilt used 56 blocks, so I’m down by a net of 49 string blocks. If I keep doing that this year, I may use up all or most of them!

This cutie measures 42x48, the usual size I make the string quilts. Here’s the back.

And that’s it for this week! I have a whole weekend to sew before starting in on the March RSC color. Saturday is our monthly Quilts for Kids workshop, where we’ll be working with crumbs and teaching the ladies to sew crumbs together. I’m bringing my Accuquilt cutter and lots of idea pictures.  

And the best news is that I’ve got dinner already prepped for tonight and Saturday, so no cooking! YAY! Have a great week everyone!