A Finish, A Plateau, and Some Fun

Good morning! It was another crazy busy week - lots of errands, appointments, places to go and people to see. I won’t bore you with a deep dive, but will share some of the highlights.

Last Saturday, my friend Ruby and I attended the International Quilting Day festivities at the Sandy City Senior Center. (No, Jenny, those Seniors weren’t scary at all! LOL). There were actually about a hundred  people there, of all ages. Mostly women, but several men too! Ruby and I each brought our machines, a fabric strip set (“jelly rolls”) so we could sew Jelly Roll Race quilts. Oh, and we brought fruits and salads to share for the pot luck luncheon. That food was fabulous, and we were able to nosh on veggies and hummus, fruits, popcorn, soup and little tastes of all sorts of other goodies while we stayed well within our Weight Watchers good food guidelines. I’ve been on a weight plateau for the last couple weeks and have started a new morning exercise routine (stationary bicycle) to shake things up a bit, so nothing to report this week in that regard.

But take a look at this awesome quilt top I finished at the International Quilting Day event. I combined certain strips to make a custom color combo from two Island Batik jelly roll sets that I bought a couple years ago when we visited Missouri Star Quilt Company. One is a sewing theme and the other is floral.

The color placement is a bit wonky, as always seems to happen with a Jelly Roll Race, but I don’t care. I love it so much. I’ll quilt it soon-ish, once I complete my other March goals. And once I figure out how I want to quilt it!  This will be mine, all mine! Ruby’s quilt turned out even more interesting. I had put together 40 width-of-fabric strips in greens and blues from my stash. I’ll try to get a picture of it for next week’s post. 

I sewed these two last elephants over the weekend too.

They round out the “herd” that will appear in this, the final elephant quilt. Here are all the elephants and the border fabric, below. My hope is to have this quilt finished by the end of the month. When it is, I will do an official Elephant Trunk Show of all the elephant quilts I’ve made. Stay tuned!

This Green Strings and Horses quilt top got basted, quilted and bound this week.

I forgot to get a picture of the back and label, but it is going to Quilts for Kids. It finished at 42x48”. I’m linking up to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

My final share for the week is this green “Creature” Quilt I’m working on using scraps and orphan blocks. It’s only partially sewn as I’m still puzzling out what will go where. 

I haven’t come up with a Creature name yet, so I’m open to suggestions!

The other highlights of the week included me renewing my passport, Bruce renewing his driver’s license, us contracting with a landscaper and scheduling some landscape work to begin next week. I talked a little bit about my idea last summer in this post HERE (see the last photo). The only change is that they will cap off all the grass sprinklers in that area and run drip irrigation tees/stubs (whatever they’re called) through the front beds on both sides of the porch. With that in place, we can hook up drip tubing to irrigate all the front flower beds and front pots on a separate station. That station can then be watered daily with targeted drip lines which will take less water and finally make it so I can fill in those beds with perennial plantings (and annual pots) and develop the beds. The work will actually begin happening on Wednesday, weather permitting. 

Have a great week!