Happy Summer Days

It was the best of times. It was the worst … No. It was definitely the best of times!  This past week was just a fun ol’ week that passed by in unassuming perfection. Not too hot, and with delightfully pleasant  evenings. We had calls and visits from (and to) family, friends, neighbors; enjoyable work in the garden, cleaning, dividing and transplanting things; harvesting and sharing tons of veggies. Eating lots of them, too. I’ve lost almost four pounds this month and am within striking distance of my pre-Covid weight. I cooked a couple great meals (tomato pie, shrimp fettuccine), and our tomatoes tasted extra good in our Turkey BLTs! I’ve received generous donations of scraps and quilt tops for Quilts for Kids and spent some happy hours sorting and “filing” them. And I sewed and quilted this week, but more balanced time-wise and not at breakneck pace like last week. It was just a simple, happy week!

The color of the month for August in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge has been orange, and this week I finished up my remaining orange blocks.  First, six Bear Paw blocks that will finish at 9”, 6” and 3”.

I also did lots of crumb sewing, finishing the orange row for my rainbow tumbler quilt top. No picture of that. But I did get a picture of the two scrappy crumb placemats I made - one in bright oranges and one in peachy oranges. 

I usually make these placemats 12x18”, but the peachy one is 13” wide. I had the scraps and didn’t want to cut off a whole inch just for the sake of uniformity. I’ll be linking up to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and also to Joy’s blog for the August Table Scraps link-up. 

Next week I should have a bunch of finishes to share, but this week I only have two.  The first one is the one I call The Ugly Quilt. It came as a large top (with a slice out of it) in a box of estate sale fabric my friend Ruby gave me. Here it is, trimmed, washed, quilted and bound. It actually feels wonderful and might be deserving of a name change to simply “not so pretty”! 

It was quilted with a simple stipple and finished at 42x49”. And yes, I noticed the little pucker on the back as I edited the photo. I should be able to fix that!

The other finish was the quilt I made from the remnants and chunks of mermaid/octopus fabric (Mendocino and another line or two). 

Again, it was quilted with a stipple. I guess I was in a stipple sort of mood! Yes, I could probably come up with a cuter pattern and cut up the fabric more and sew it back together…. But then it would’ve been smaller. As is, it ended up measuring 41x47.5”.

And that’s it for the sewing! I did receive a wonderful - and I mean GORGEOUS - quilt top from McGill U. in South Carolina. But I haven’t had a chance to press it yet, so that will happen this week. I will blog about it and show a picture next week. I have three little community quilts that are waiting to be quilted, and I hope to do all four before month-end. I also have the salmon-and-sage quilt top done and waiting to be basted and quilted. So there will be some rapid-fire finishes this coming week before I dig in to the September scraps! 

And tonight, as Bruce was prepping the coffee pot for the morning, he looked over at the cats’ bowls and started laughing. Alfie had been playing with this toy mouse while we were eating dinner, but we didn’t think any more about it until we saw this…. What does it mean? LOL!!