Finishing Frenzy, Week 2

It was a great week in the sewing studio and at Chez Kizerian in general. Bruce passed his CERT training (Citizens Emergency Response Training) through the Murray Fire Department and his ham radio club. YAY! Yep, even being one-armed he can tote training dummies, etc. This week I lost the last of my Covid weight gain (finally), and am now on track to begin losing the “older” poundage, LOL. The weather here has been crisp and cold, with occasional rain and even snow. Beautiful! Just like the old days. Maybe we’ll have a normal, snowy winter!

So, let’s talk quilting. Over the course of the last week or ten days I sewed up 28 black string blocks (that will finish at 6” each) as I try to whittle down my dark neutral scraps along with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Down the center of each block is a strip of black-and-bright fabric. These 28 blocks joined 28 other blocks of bright solids and a “carpenter” print that had the same colors. This is the resulting quilt top:

I am so totally in love with this top! But the best part is the backing fabric, which was the inspiration for the whole color scheme and pattern. It was in the batch of fabric and scraps that sweet Wanda sent me a couple months ago. A match made heaven, I say. 

This cutie will be basted and quilted in the next week. Also serving as inspiration from Wanda was these bright cat strips below. At least I think they were from Wanda. I received so many scraps from several directions in October that I’m not entirely sure. But I’m thinking this looks like so many other cute animal scrap fabrics that Wanda has bestowed on me for Quilts for Kids, so I’m going with her!  

These width-of-fabric strips are just pinned on the design wall for now. In this month’s continuing effort to pare down some of my black scraps, I made two rows of vertical black strips with an occasional black-and-bright strip thrown in. The backing will be more of the cat fabric and some Tula Pink cat-eye fabric from her old Tabby Road line. I’ll show that next week. This top, like the first one, is slated to be finished up in the coming week. Then I have one more quilt planned for the black scraps for later this month. 

I did finish off the quilting of three other little quilts this week, which puts my Finishing Frenzy tally at 6. These first two were sent to me as tops by Jo Kramer (Jo’s Country Junction) to quilt, finish and be donated to a charity of my choice. As you know by now, Quilts for Kids is my choice.

The first one is a Dr. Seuss-themed quilt. I quilted it with loops. It measures 40x50”.

The backing was this cat fabric, which I felt was necessary since The Cat in the Hat was not represented on the front, hehe.....

The second quilt was this bright daisy-themed number, which measures 41x56”. Bruce likes this one best because..... RED. It’s his favorite color.  

I practiced some different free-motion quilting motifs with this quilt. Yes, I did do stipples in the red and blue strips, but the daisies were outlined with scribble-style quilting (my term; I don’t know what it’s really called. Do you?) and the borders were done in a wishbone pattern.

I find the kids quilts to be a good opportunity to practice new things on now and then because no one really cares if it’s only “meh”. 

My third and final finish for the week was this little basic patchwork quilt. I cut it out in Blue September, but never worked on it until this week. The lavender blocks stand out more in the photos than in real life, but other than that you can see it’s just a sweet mash-up of miscellaneous 4” blocks.

I used my machine’s walking foot to quilt a basic grid pattern. The backing is an older piece I’ve had laying around for awhile.  This soft little quilt finished at 40x48”. 

That’s it for this week. I’m hoping to concentrate more on finishing 5-6 quilts next week as I’ve got two basted and ready to go (an elephant quilt and the blue and red checkerboard), and four more tops that will be ready for basting by the end of today.