Saturday, October 4, 2025
Time Out
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Squirrel in the Strings!
This week a “squirrel” got into my sewing room and so my sewing plans for the week took a bit of a detour. That means there was absolutely no quilting on my Halloween quilt, which puts it at the very top of my priority list for the next few sewing sessions until it is finished. But in the meantime, there are a few things to share.
My daughter Megan called and asked me if I’d sew a couple little kitty quilts for their new furbabies, Laszlo and Nadja. The kitties are named after two “funny vampires” in some TV series that Megan and Ted watch.
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Nadja and Laszlo (with crossed eyes) |
Laszlo’s quilt in blues and greens fits perfectly with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge’s colors of the month, a redux of blues and greens.
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Strings and crumbs |
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Bright Animals Strippy |
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little Bricks Pastel |
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Little Bricks Bright |
Saturday, September 20, 2025
More Strings and Things
Hello friends! Welcome to another weekend (hallelujah!). It’s crazy that even when you’re retired, the weekend always seems to be the best time to relax and spend time with family and friends. And this is going to be a great weekend. Later this morning I head to the closest fabric shop to me (five minutes away), where our monthly Quilts for Kids workshop will be. I have five of my own little quilts to take, as well as about 11 from my friend Ruby who started quilting quilts for them on her longarm.
The fabric store, Nuttall’s (a local chain of 4 stores from along the Wasatch Front), is also where I agreed to accompany Ruby last night, along with her sister Cathy, as well as Cousin Kim and niece Jenny to a year-long quilt class. We will meet once monthly, but from now on we’ll be going on Saturday mornings. One big happy group of family and friends.
This past week I didn’t work on my Halloween quilt at all, but I will be focusing on it heavily this coming week. I’ll be able to get a lot of sewing time in, and I’m looking forward to it. I did, however, sew the remaining Little Bricks blocks into a quilt top, and made a backing for it. The one I did last week was in pastels, and this one is all brights. These were also blocks that I did for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge back in 2023, so they are sufficiently “aged”, LOL.
So now I have three more little quilts waiting to be pin basted, and I’d love to get them done in the next week. But I do have a lot of batch cooking planned for the week. I do it (batch cooking) to some extent every fall. But with me facing knee surgery in a couple months, I’m particularly interested in making ahead and freezing lots of dinners. This week I’ll be focusing on lasagna and chicken enchilada casserole. The following week I’ll make chili and start on some soups. After that, I’m not sure. But I’ve got time.
And then there were the strings. Lots and lots of those. First there were three sets (of 15 blocks each) in brown, to finish off all those. My brown scrap drawer is breathing a sigh of relief!
And then I did two 15-blocks sets of multi-colored strings.
I’ve started pinning the sets up on the very left area of my design board to keep track. I’ve now completed 180 blocks of my goal of 600 blocks by year-end.
Darla was rolling around on the floor by my chair yesterday morning, meowing away and generally just being a happily little girl. I couldn’t resist snapping some pictures. She is usually so refined and elegant, but she is still a cat, and sometimes a girl just needs a good back scratching. She also has a very fine and fuzzy tummy, and you can easily see the orange undertones of her coat.
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Better Late Than Never
Oh man, I was so sick last night and this morning (nothing major - just something bad I ate) that I couldn’t even begin to think about doing a blog post until almost this (Saturday) afternoon. But I’m here now.
This week, my sewing time was grabbed in bits and chunks and a brief hour here or there. My first priority was to get my Haunted House Halloween quilt basted. And I did. No pictures of the fully pinned quilt, but here’s a quick shot of the spiderweb, which was my first quilting priority.
I’ve also started stitching on the house and tree branches, but there’s not much to see yet. I will do a more thorough job of picture-taking next week. My goal is to get this done and bound by the end of the month so that I have all of October to enjoy it.
Naturally, I did some string block (6.5”) sewing. I got 45 done this week - three groups of 15. As you can see, I did one group of brown strings. I have plenty brown strings left to sew at least one, and maybe two, batches of 15-block strings. Then I’ll pair them with matching novelty fabrics and donate to Quilts for Kids for kits.
For my “Fall Finishing Frenzy” this year, I’m keeping my string blocks until the end of the year. My goal is to do 600 by December 31, and I want to see how tall that string pile will be! In the meantime, I have 105 blocks sewn so far, and I’m pinning the sets up on my design board to keep an easy tally. I’ll show a picture of that next week as well.
Finally I had time to tackle the Little Bricks blocks that I made as part of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks back in 2023. I made one entire kid quilt with green blocks back then, but I have enough blocks to make two more little quilts. I laid out, then webbed this first top of mainly pastels.
The Little Bricks blocks pattern comes courtesy of Sylvia at Treadlestitches. They measure 6”, finished size. Next week I’ll sew together the bright Little Bricks blocks. Then I can sew up a backing and have three more little quilts to layer up and finish.
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That’s all I have sewing-wise from here. but I have to take a moment to comments of the shooting that took place this week here in Utah.
It’s so gut-wrenching when another horrific shooting takes place, especially when it’s in your back yard, so to speak. (My daughter graduated from UVU and we are familiar with the campus). While I had no agreement with or anything but disdain for most of Charlie Kirk’s beliefs, I certainly believe in his right to express them without fear or retaliation. He was a human being with an adorable little family, for heaven’s sake. Then some whack-job just snuffs him out because he could - he owned a gun and possessed a lot of anger. This type of slaying will continue until and unless we realize we have to put sensible controls on firearms. The type and quantity even allowed should be limited, ownership should be strict and registered, and penalties for abuse need to be swift and permanent. But I’m just one helpless voice shouting into the wind.
PS - my comments on the blog are no longer being sent to my email (this just happened out of the blue). I didn’t realize that I’d even had any comments on last week’s post until I physically checked the blog. Does anyone know how to correct this?
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Slinging the Strings
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Little Quilt Finishes to Share
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Small Steps, Big Decisions
Hello quilty friends! This week I finished up playing with my aqua and teal scraps, and boy did I knock them back! I trust that they’ll replenish themselves (don’t they always?) before next year’s round of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. But if they didn’t, I might be *forced* to go fabric shopping! Wouldn’t that be just awful? Hahahaha!
First, let me make an announcement regarding the A Quilter’s Cove Quilt-Along. This is the “big decisions” thing that was referenced in my blog post title. The date for the start of the QAL has been moved to ….. January 2026. We will be running it in conjunction with the 2026 Rainbow Scrap Challenge! Angela was excited and agreed that it would be a good fit and she’d be happy to help. So, the pace will be more leisurely, and everyone is invited to join us through the RSC! .
Naturally, we’ll talk about it more as the time grows closer. But in the meantime, think about if you’d like to make a quilt or a wall-hanging. I’m going to do both - a quilt with pieced little houses and trees in all the RSC colors every month. But I’ll also be doing a wall-hanging with piecing, appliqué, and embroidered details. In fact, this is the booklet I’ll be adapting for my wall-hanging minus the flowered block borders but adding my own details.
I haven’t picked my pieced quilt pattern(s) yet, but I may just mix it up and do lots of variety. Anyway, I hope you’ll join us in 2026. Kat and I are planning to present bi-weekly “lessons” with samples, patterns and links as we go along.
Moving on, the “small steps” portion of my post title refers to my scrappy sewing this week. My primary goal was to finish up my crumb blocks. I had eleven crumb aqua crumb blocks left over from the past two years. I sewed 8 more to end up with 19.
Fifteen of them were pulled for our Quilts for Kids chapter - they make quilt kits with 15 solid-color string or crumb blocks in assembling certain kits. The other four will go into my block orphanage to await more brethren. As usual, I’m linking up to Angela’s Scrappy Saturday post for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.
I was also able to spend some time sewing together part of my Halloween quilt. The side blocks are attached to the main panel.
Obviously, I will need to add a couple 1” (1.5” before sewing) coping strips alongside each of the bat blocks to get everything to line up. The panel was 22.5” wide and I need 24.5” width there for accommodate all the 12” blocks. No problem - I knew this from the start of the project. The four blocks for the bottom row will get the same treatment. Hopefully I’ll have a finished flimsy to show next week.
I also layered and pin basted three more quilts this week, but didn’t get a chance to quilt them. Here they are, ready to be quilted.
And that’s all I have this week. The next several weeks will be intense for me as far as our HOA goes. We are underway in the budget planning, and next week I have three meetings - our regular Board monthly meeting, our weekly Budget Planning meeting, and an evening community-wide input meeting. I’m getting through it only because there is an endpoint in sight for me - the end of the year. Actually, nothing much happens after Thanksgiving, so it’s really only three more months. I keep thinking about how much free time I’ll have (to sew and relax) when this is all over. But for now, I’m straight-jacketed into the commitments I made. Breathe, Cathy, breathe.
xo, and make it a great week!
Saturday, August 16, 2025
A Couple of String Quilt Finishes
Hello! I’m happy to share that I have a couple more quilt finishes this week. It’s been a long, dry spell for me between finishes. Well, I just looked back and it was mid-June when I finished the last three. I guess it’s not *that* long, but it seems like it to me. But summer is drawing to a close and I feel prime sewing and quilting weather coming around the corner!
Yep, that’s my exercise bike there in the corner. It won’t be getting any more use until I’m recovered from my knee surgeries this winter.
That’s all I have for this week. I hope you’re enjoying the last few weeks of summer. Me, I’m so ready to be done with summer. And it occurs to me that I haven’t even been swimming one time yet this year. I’ll have to rectify that before the pool closes for the season in early September!