Saturday, May 17, 2025

Green Scraps, Continued

This week I didn’t get much sewing time in at all. On Saturday after my Quilts for Kids workshop, the family gathered to celebrate Mother’s Day at my son Ryan’s house. My daughter-in-law Kim and I were the special mothers, but we also celebrated belated birthdays for Bruce and my granddaughter Lauren. There were a lot of gifts exchanged! Ryan fixed his special birria tacos. He even made the dipping consomme’ to go with it. Yum!


Sunday was a quiet day at home, just the way we like it. The weather was still nice (ahead of the storm due to arrive on Monday), so I spent the afternoon working out in the yard. I’m still waiting for our garden handyman to come - he’s been very ill with an infection but is finally on the mend. He’ll be digging up a couple barberry bushes for me, removing the top layer of old soil and bark mulch, and straightening out all the stone edging between the beds and the patio. Then we’ll add a fresh layer of rich topsoil. But in the meantime I had purchased some perennials I needed to plant, so I did; two rose bushes, two more brunnera, some astilbe, a hosta, some lady’s mantle. I planted two of my Mexican Talavera pots with a few annual flowers as decorations for the Cinco de Mayo luncheon and took those up to the clubhouse. Once our yard guy completes his heavy work, I can go in and plant my perennial groundcovers and showy annual flowers. Hopefully I can get some pictures by early June. Oh! We bought a new blue standing patio umbrella to set up too! 

Monday was filled with meetings; Tuesday was Weight Watchers, the annual Cinco de Mayo luncheon at the clubhouse, and a CT scan appointment for Bruce. Wednesday was an eye appointment for me so they could measure my right eye in preparation for my upcoming cataract surgery, and then we went to Costco to order eyeglasses for Bruce. I got in a bit of sewing time that evening and spent it making a couple playing card holders.. You may have seen these before; they’re made two compact disks layered with a piece of batting and a cute fabric that’s gathered on the inside. Then they’re held together by a cute button on either side, sewn through the center to make it all sturdy and tidy. They make holding a handful of cards soooo much easier!

Here are the two I finished this week, and then I have two more to make next week. First, a top view.


And the side view where you place the cards in. 


On Thursday morning I did laundry and errands and then played cards at the clubhouse with my friends. The woman I made the warm floral card holder for was so tickled! She’s recovering from a hand surgery, so it helped alleviate her cramping hand while holding cards. Friday morning was my annual physical (all is fine, but he says I need a bone density scan done), and I did the grocery shopping. FINALLY I got to do some sewing in the afternoon. Green is the May color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, so I set to work.


Eleven flying geese blocks. These will finish at 6”.  I also did one 6” string block because I was going to add a column of strings to the green scrap quilt I’m making. But then I decided to save the string blocks for Quilts for Kids instead. However, I did get another column of green blocks sewn. Here’s the mess pinned to the design board. You may notice that I cannot pin evenly to save my life. But no matter - this is still a work in process and things will be getting shuffled.


The snowball column on the left will move to a different spot and the cross-like blocks will have ivory spacer strips sewn between them. It was necessary to add the darker sashing strips between columns to make sense of the mess. It was looking so “one-note” and bland until I added them.. The pink checkerboard block bugs the heck out of me, and so does the block above it screaming for attention. I’ll move that column over to a side and see if that helps. If not, I may rework those two blocks.

This morning, Cousin Kim and Ruby and I are going to the annual quilt expo here in town. So I’d better get moving!! 

Saturday, May 10, 2025

Green Springtime

Hello friends, how was your week? I think it’s always fun to arrive at Saturday, when we scrap quilters can share our weekly playtime results with scraps. In May, we are working with all shades of green for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

It had been a couple weeks or more since I’d sewn any string blocks, so that was my primary focus for my sewing time this week. You know, scratch that sewing itch! I truly wish I could’ve had more time to sew and foregone all the doctor appointments, errands, shopping and chauffeuring as well, but yeah… no. Life doesn’t work that way. But on the bright side, I’ll be having a cataract removed in a few short weeks, I bought a couple dozen luscious perennials to plant in the courtyard, and I’ve got loads of strawberries in the freezer just waiting to be made into jams and strawberry-rhubarb compote. 

The week started out with me tackling my largest string pile of all the colors - greens. It ended with 52  6.5” green string blocks. That will give me three 15-count batches of green strings to take to Quilts for Kids this morning, along with the red ones I sewed last month. The extra seven will either go into the Orphanage to wait until next year or may find their way into a green scrap quilt I’m working on for Green May. 


Once the green strings were sewn, I began piecing together the first of the Rainbow Candies flimsies. My original plan was to sew all the blocks in the same orientation. However, I messed up when I sewed row 2, so I had to pay extra close attention as I sewed each subsequent row to maintain the pattern. And paying attention is not my strong suit. But I actually like it better! I think alternating the direction adds more movement to the top. 

I’ll sew the other blocks into the second Rainbow Candies top this next week, sewing gods willing. 


I’m sewing 48” columns from my green scraps. The column on the very left, given to me as 4-rail blocks, are about an inch short. But I have a couple more strips of those fabrics to even it out. It’s been fun  planning out this green top, and the tentative plan is to make it 40x48”. But I’m toying with the idea of turning it 90 degrees making it a 48x54” quilt of green rows! We’ll just have to see what the fabrics determine!

It was a crazy-busy day yesterday (Friday), and I wasn’t able to sneak any sewing time in until almost supper time. In my sewing room as I waited for the chicken to finish baking, Alfie joined me feeling very needy for attention. So when he insisted on helping me plan out my two Halloween blocks for the month, who was I to argue?

Alfie, helping

I’ve got to get moving along this morning. Quilts for Kids starts soon. I’m already packed up but it will take me about 25 minutes to drive to this month’s location. Later this afternoon and evening, we’ll be at my son and DIL Kim’s place where my son Ryan is cooking birria tacos. We are belatedly celebrating my granddaughter Lauren’s birthday (last month), Bruce’s belated birthday (last week) and Mother’s Day for Kim and me. The whole fam-damily will be there. 

Happy Mother’s Day to those of you who celebrate. Have a great week!

Saturday, May 3, 2025

Giving Scraps the Green Light

Green gets a green light in the sewing room this month. May is not only green outside (it’s so beautiful here in the Salt Lake Valley in May!) but we’ll be working with our green fabric scraps inside for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge all month. And I’m down for it!

But first I wanted to finish up the quilting and binding on the two quilts I basted last week so I could put them down as April finishes. And I did. But it’s hard to get pictures when you only have a one-armed Quilt Holder (my hubby Bruce had an arm amputated due to cancer from Agent Orange in Vietnam). And it’s also very bright outdoors, so we had to find some shade or dappled sun so I could snap some pictures. Given the results of these photos, I think I’ll be taking the photos indoors or on cloudy days from now on.  But I’ll share these photos now, for better or for worse. 

This string quilt pattern came to me from my friend Nann of With Strings Attached, who thought it up. Big thanks (and hugs) to you, my friend! 


The backing is green with a bright insert that seemed to fit the vibe of the quilt. As usual, I quilted this string quilt in a basic meander/stipple. I always feel that’s best for coverage in a string quilts. The working title for this quilt was “Nann’s Strings”, but its final name is “Nann’s Heart Strings” because of the very recent passing of her husband.  Nann, what a wonderful companion and caregiver you’ve been to Stevens. May this silly little quilt also give comfort to someone else - all because of you! 


The second finish for April was this purple diamonds quilt. I absolutely could not get the color accurate with my iPhone camera. It’s less of a red-purple and more of a blue-purple. But that’s OK, I guess. It’s done and will be heading off to our Quilts for Kids workshop next weekend. 


I had just enough of the purple fabric to finish the backing and binding. That is, with the addition of the little bit of blue in the back. 

And then - green sewing! Fifteen Switchplate blocks that will finish at 3x5”.


And here they are with all their friends that I’ve sewn this year. We haven’t quite reached the halfway point with these yet, but they’re shaping up.


I started sewing the side sashing to the Rainbow Candy blocks. But of course I sewed the second row bass-ackwards from the first row. No problem, I thought. I’ll just flip the row. Um… no. It’s still the wrong orientation and then the two greens would be neighbors. So I will be alternating the direction of the candies every row. 


I’ll continue with this during the week, as well as sewing its twin with the other half of the candy blocks. And I’ve pulled out all my green strings for some nice string piecing this week too. I loves me some mindless string piecing (key word there being “mindless”).

This week was another doozy. Sometimes I just want to run away to a nice tropical island, lay under a tree sipping Margaritas and napping. (Who’s with me?)

Anyway, we sold our second car this week, but it entailed a lot of phone calls and running around. It was three days of chaos, then done. And I even remembered to promptly cancel the insurance on it. My friend T is coming home from the hospital today, YAY!! We are so relieved, I can’t even believe how much her illness has worried us. But one of our neighbors passed away this week. Another friend, Joan, had her daughter visiting from Connecticut, and they invited me over for lunch one day, then sent me home with cake for Bruce. 

My grandson Easton is getting married next April. Right now Easton and his fiancé Madalyn live in Connecticut (yes, a lot of Connecticut people in this post, right Julierose?) and he is in the Navy. His mom, my daughter-in-law Kim, and I talked about colors and theme for their wedding quilt. So, I’m going to attempt a Storm at Sea with a Snail’s Trail block variation in the center of some blocks instead of the large square-in-square economy block center. This is my inspiration photo from Pinterest:

I have an Accuquilt Storm at Sea die, which I can use for all the diamonds and small economy blocks (I’ve checked sizes) then I’ll piece all 36 of the 6.5” Snails Trail centers separately. Right now, the hunt is on for a line drawing to color up so I can figure color placement and yardage amounts. We have a quilt show coming to town in a couple weeks, and I plan to buy the needed batiks it all at once. This quilt has been on my bucket list for years. I hope I’m finally capable of pulling it off. If not, there’s always simple patchwork to fall back on!

Have a great and relaxing week!