Yello-phants

What a busy and fun week it was! The temperature got up to 70 F degrees on Thursday, which was a fluke. Friday was cloudy and cooler and we’re expecting snow - or rain - this weekend. We need the moisture and I would much prefer that to unseasonable temperatures!

I’m going to back up to last Saturday and hit the week’s highlights from there. At our monthly Quilts for Kids workshop, the program was changed from working with scraps and bits of fabric (crumb piecing) to working with strips. That made sense, actually, since we can then use the resulting scraps in a future crumb workshop. We’ll be doing crumbs in May. But on Saturday, we sewed like the wind and a dozen of us got through one 18-gallon tub of strips in 3 hours and churned out lots of string blocks. Typically we make quilt kits that members can “check out” (like a library) and then sew and return. These string kits will consist of 15 strip blocks and 15 solid blocks, 6.5” unfinished each, plus enough fabric for two small borders. We made enough strip/string blocks for 20 kits!

165 string blocks = 2 piles of 3.5” each!

That workshop had me all fired up for sewing strings, so on Sunday and Monday, I pieced 75 string blocks, then pulled out 90 more multi-colored string blocks from my cache. I’ve been making them for months and months. So, 165 more blocks are going to our Board to make the kits!!

I have plenty of strips and strings to work with, and that was supplemented by my friend Claudia in Washington who sent a boxful of kid fabrics for backings, as well as chunks and strips. It’s so much fun to have a fresh infusion of kids fabrics, especially when some of what I have is dark or adult-ish. Thank you, Claudia!

Claudia - you might recognize those monkeys!!

Tuesday brought March and the start of a new color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This month we are working with our yellows and golds. How perfect is that? So many of us have the Ukraine people in our hearts and minds, and the interwebs are springing up with yellow and blue (Ukranian flag colors) quilting ideas to ease our hearts and possibly provide potential fundraising opportunities. I plan to join in later this month as some of these organized efforts begin. How about you?

But first I tackled my yellow elephants. Yellophants!!

I got all six of them made this week. Notice the pineapple ears. Chevron ears. So much fun! These blocks will finish at 10”, and are from Wendy Shepard’s pattern, Stomping Ground. 

Next up were the Antique Tile blocks. I’m doing two of these for 10 months and will assemble all 20 blocks at year-end into a quilt that measures 48x60” (or larger with sashing).

On Wednesday, Bruce and I went to a newish quilt shop and we dropped off Swimmingly for quilting.  The picture at the right is just to refresh your memory. The picture makes it look bowed, but it’s not in real life!

Before taking it to the quilter, and thanks to the pep talk by my friend Roseanne, I gave myself some grace and didn’t throw in the towel on it. Instead, I added a small black stop border around the entire perimeter of the quilt (not shown in the picture) to preserve the points. At the quilt shop, we picked out a nautical-themed pantograph. Bruce had a ball checking out their long arm quilting machines and talking to the ladies. 

We’ll have it back in a couple weeks, which will give me plenty of time to add the black binding and finish it before the Stay at Home Round Robin finished quilt parade. I’m trying to think of a venue that might be good to use for some glamour shots of the finished quilt. But we’re landlocked here, and I don’t see (sea?) a visit to the coast in my immediate future. There’s always the Great Salt Lake, but..... um, probably not. 

On the same day we went to the quilt shop, we actually spent the afternoon at South Towne Mall in Sandy, where we went clothes shopping (pants for both of us, plus a belt for Bruce and personals for me) and had a coffee treat and split a pretzel. And then we stopped for a nice dinner on the way home. Wow. It was so nice to be out and about in public again and doing some normal things. And I sure got in a lot of steps!

The other thing I did this week was pull three personal (“personal” meaning made by me) “kits” of scraps to make Quilts for Kids quilts this month. The first turned out not to have as much yellow in it as I thought, but I added the middle yellow chunk and it will work fine for this month. Here is what I’ve cobbled together.

This top helps me use up the aqua selvage half-hexie blocks and lots of random pastel strips in pink, yellow and aqua. It measures 40x46”, perfect for a little toddler girl. I plan to quilt it this coming week along with one or two or three other quilts from Jo’s Country Junction Community Quilts program. All finished quilts will go to the Salt Lake Quilts for Kids group, and be documented here and eventually on Jo’s blog. 

I think that just about wraps it up for this week. Tonight we’re going to my son Ryan and DDIL Kim’s house for dinner and to celebrate Ryan’s and my birthday. It’s a little early for both, but for working couples like Ryan and Kim, weekends are it. Ryan is doing the cooking (he loves it and he’s the best chef in the family!) and I’m baking the cakes. Yes, that’s cakeS, plural. Ryan and I like the plain yellow cake with buttercream frosting and Kim and Bruce like chocolate (which will be made into cupcakes). And they’ll get all the leftovers, so I won’t feel guilty having just one piece!!