Blue February, SAHRR Round 2 and a Finish

Well, we’ve made it through another week of cold weather. At least (or maybe unfortunately, depending on your perspective), we’re getting another abundant snow storm. A couple of my friends and I were planning to drive up to Park City (40 minutes in good weather), but the snowstorm has forced us to postpone our Girls Day Out for the time being. But there’s always plenty of sewing to keep me out of trouble (theoretically), so I’ll take solace in that!

Let’s start with the pink scrap quilt that I quilted this week. I had to make an emergency run to JoAnn Fabrics to buy some sewing machine needles before I started because I was down to my last 80/12 needle in the machine. And let me tell you, that place might as well shut their doors. Yes, I know they’ve filed for bankruptcy again; this time liquidation instead of reorganization. Our store had removed fully half the lighting. Every other fluorescent tube was gone. Try looking for needles sizes in a half-lit store with wonky 70-year-old eyes. Talk about a needle in a haystack. I did manage to buy two packs, but wow, their shelves already looked meagerly stocked, yet unopened cartons were everywhere. Obviously not enough staff. And their ridiculous sales still continue (Buy 2 get 3 free on thread). What numbskull thought *that* was a good business practice? No wonder they went bankrupt. I got my needles (and some backing fabric for my SAHRR quilt) and was glad to leave. 

Anyway, I finished quilting the scrappy pink Midnight at the Bubblegum Factory hodgepodge quilt. It finished at 39x43”. It was my last finish for Pink January in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

For February, Angela has called blue as the color of the month. I figured I should get started on my blocks, as February is a short month. I spent a pleasant afternoon on Thursday sorting all my blue scraps. There were a lot of fresh new blue scraps in there from various sources since the last time we worked on blue back in June of last year. 

The first scrappy blue blocks off the needle for February are these seven “Paint Chips”. That’s my working name for this block found on Pinterest without attribution. 

Because I have so many blue scraps, I ended up doing some color play to come up with these. It was rather fun - navy, bright, pastel, grayed-blues, etc.  They're generally alright, although I did mix up placement on a couple columns, and the camera doesn’t accurately reflect all the colors. But oh well.

I spent a couple afternoons playing with my Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR) quilt top. This is what the project looked like at the end of Round 1 last week: 

I hadn’t decided whether to add the chains on the side, preferring to wait until Round 2 was called by this week’s hostess, Anja. When Anja called half square triangles for Round Two, I sewed the chain on and added a little red stop border to bring the size up to 20.5 x 26.5”.  Here’s what it looked like at that point.

One of my goals for each round is to incorporate all four major colors (red, orange, yellow and purple) as well as the coordinating print fabric. Now this may change in future rounds, but for now that’s what I’m trying to do. So I made six half-square triangles of each color to embellish each corner, and cut squares and rectangles of the print fabric to incorporate. This is what I came up with.

OMG, I’m loving it so far! It measures 24.5 x 30.5” at this stage. Here are some close-ups. 

The camera keeps making the purple look like black, but I can assure you that in real life it’s a very rich royal purple. 

And that’s it for this week’s SAHRR Round 2. The linky party is HERE if you’d like to see how others are interpreting this week’s prompt. It’s a lot of fun to see what others are doing! I love the creative challenge that this round robin offers every year!!

I’ve been doing some string sewing here and there (mostly on Sundays) over the last couple weeks. This block idea came from my friend Nann. My blocks measure 8.5” when two (a right and a left) are sewn together. I’m trying to make ten blocks per month, and in January I sewed fifteen. Now, I dropped one on the floor and didn’t find it until after I snapped the photo. 

So, I already have a head start on February’s blocks! But no matter, once I sit down to sew strings, I can go on and on and on and…. I loves me some string blocks, and I think this is a stunning pattern.