Purple Has Left the Building

It’s not even the end of the month yet, and I’m totally done with my purple scraps. There are a few strips and bits left to use as “seeds” for accumulating more purple scraps for next year. In the meantime, I have two more quilt finishes to show you and a patriotic Squirrel! project in the form of a table runner.  

But before that, typing the preceding sentence (squirrel!) reminded me of a story from when I was a little girl, about age 4. My parents were both born in the US (New York) of immigrant parents - all from Hungary. While everyone spoke English, if the grandparents didn’t want us grandkids to know what they were saying, they’d speak in Hungarian. My mom and my aunt spoke basic Hungarian. My grandparents also spoke German, so if they didn’t want anyone to know what they were talking about, they spoke German. I loved languages. My little girlfriend Phyllis and I had our own made-up language we spoke (as if we really knew what we were saying....). But I digress... When I played with my dolls, I had them speak in different languages. One day I was playing with my dolls in my room and my mom came in and asked me to repeat something. I said the word “mo-kush”. She told me it was the Hungarian word for squirrel (mokus, with an accent mark over the ‘o’). So, “squirrel" was my first Hungarian word!  

Without further ado, here were the last of the purple scraps that I sewed this week.

14 four-patch blocks from 2.5” squares (above) and 9 crumb blocks, 6.5” unfinished size (below)

That brought my total purple blocks for June to 89. I’m linking up to Scrappy Saturday at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Early in the week I basted the two quilts I had finished tops for. These will go to Quilts for Kids, as usual. Once they were quilted and bound, I added them to the ever-growing pile of quilts to be delivered. First is this cute little pink and purple scrappy number that finished at 37x43.5”

The pictures don’t do justice to this sweet little quilt! I had the perfect backing (a 1-yard cut that my friend Angie sent me last year) and to that I added this leftover purple Twin Sisters block and some darker purple strips as they seemed a bit strong for the front.

The fabric is adorable!

Next up was the dark purple donation quilt that I could not bring myself to name (and why bother with a donation quilt after all?). There were sure some great suggestions in the reader comments last week, though! I just hope it doesn’t give any kid nightmares!

This one finished at 38.5x43.5”. The backing (a questionable choice, but I thought the gray was more purplish....) is a piece from Connecting Threads that I bought six yards of - enough for four quilts. So you’ll be seeing it again.

And it was about this time, Wednesday, that The Squirrel Struck!!  I have been separating patriotic scraps from my Quilts for Kids scraps, because they really try to avoid holidays and patriotic in their little quilts. I ended up with lots of strings and a few chunks and 8 navy and white HSTs.  I thought doing a few stars would be nice - and remembered the leftover red HSTs from this project (where I cut a block wrong) one. So from there it was easy to come up with three sawtooth star blocks with string centers.

I did make a mistake and use a non-Kona white in some pieces around the center red star and it bugs me. How did they get into my Kona White Scraps drawer, anyway? But oh well.  Another oops - I meant to alternate the direction of the star stripes, but that got all futzed up too. Leave it to Cathy! Anyway, there was a 2.5” navy strip of star fabric that was just enough for a border if I added cornerstones. So I did. And then it was finished off with the perfect red and white striped binding.

It’s not the best of pictures, but I wanted to take it upstairs and put it on our dining room table. Maybe I’ll get another picture later in situ. Anyway, my favorite part (besides the binding) is the cute fabric I’ve had a couple years to use as a backing. I consider this totally reversible!

I’ll be joining in with the monthly Table Scraps linkup with Joyful Quilter and company. 

I’ve been working on my latest iteration of the Zipper Quilt (so addictive!) - this one to use as a sample for a scrappy workshop this fall for our local Quilts for Kids chapter. The bottom four rows have been sewn, the last two are still pinned on top of one another on the design board. Usually I work bottom to top in order to keep my color order while growing a quilt. It’s easier to let sewn parts hang down below the board.... (does that make sense?)

 

I would love to finish this before the end of the month to give me 39 quilt finishes in the first half of the year. I was shooting for 40, but I won’t make that. 

Finally, I’ll be joining the linkup on Sunday with Bernie and Preeti for the Positivity Quilt Along progress link-up. Here are my first 24 blocks - exactly half of what I need. I wish these looked a little more orderly and more nicely pressed. But I love the gender-neutral blues, purples (not pink!) and turquoise. I’m not sure yet if I’ll be alternating the light-dark backgrounds or creating a dark frame like the picture below.  I have a few weeks and lots more sewing to do before I have to decide.

And with that, I’m off to order another small iron for my workshop. My current little iron died after only 9 months. I’ve tried just about every brand and none has lasted me more than a year and a half. I use my irons every day in my studio, so they need to be sturdy little workhorses. They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to.....

End of the Yellow Scrap Road

It’s been a fun and busy month for sewing, but it’s time to wrap up the yellow scraps for February. I had hoped to get more personal sewing done (namely, finishing the Beachcomber Quilt), but that will have to be pushed to March. 

This week I got my first Covid vaccine, and it was a good experience. I had no reaction whatsoever - not even a sore arm. And while getting checked in at the site, I met a lovely young girl whose name was Naserian. I asked her where she was from and she said “Africa”. I laughed and said I knew that, but what country? She replied “Kenya”. My eyes opened wide and I told her I’d visited Kenya (mostly the Narok area) and LOVED it.  Well, she was born in Narok! “I am Maasai!” she exclaimed. We nearly hugged each other, then remembered where we were and just giggled instead. It turns out she knows my friends Marilyn S and OD (Samuel Ole Dere). We kept laughing about what a small world it is. Needless to say, she and I exchanged info and will be keeping in touch. It made a good day (vaccine) into a GREAT day!! Anyway, I go back in mid-March for my second dose.

This week I finished up the final two February yellow/gold kid quilts for the Salt Lake chapter of Quilts for Kids. This first one is Wild Thing. Remember these quilts are from scraps donated by various ladies (including my own scraps), and are the trimmings and cast-offs from other projects. That is why there is rarely much of any one fabric. I just do what I can to make some sort of semi-cohesive (and sometimes underwhelming) quilt out of them.

Wild Thing was quilted in a loopy design and finished at 39.5”x42”.  The last yellow quilt for the month I’m just calling Yellow Thang because - well, do donation quilts really need names?  It finished at 40.5x44.5” and was also quilted with loops.

Here’s a closeup of the front and part of the back.
 

All four of the yellow February QFK quilts can be seen at my 2021 Quilts page link, above under the header.

Here is a recap of the yellow Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks I sewed for February. Sewing those yellow 

Wishing Ring blocks (middle left, below) completes the blocks I need for the Wishing Ring Around the Roses quilt. Fingers crossed that I’ll have time in March to assemble it! 

When I started last month to sew along with the Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR), I thought of it as a harmless little squirrel - a small side project. Each round only took a little bit of planning and an hour (ish) to sew. Easy peasy. Well, just like kids, chicks, saplings and other things that grow, this little squirrel is now a MONSTER. This latest round took two afternoons of measuring, planning, cutting, sewing, cussing, ripping, recutting, rethinking, more cussing, more sewing - you get the picture.

But this round is done! This week’s hostess is Susan, and she called log cabins. I decided to add little 4” log cabins only to the top and bottom to make the quilt more rectangular. I dislike the navy print I used, but want so badly to use it up. You can see it also on the small plus signs from an earlier round. It’s also a rather visually “mushy” print. 

The bottom row IS straight, even though it is hanging wonky (wonkily?). The top currently measures 42.5” across and 56.5” long.  I’m linking up to Susan’s linky party for this week. Whatever block is called for next week’s final round will likely be done with the red and bolder green prints I have remaining. 

I decided it was high time to get working on my piece(s) for the February Table Scraps monthly challenge at Joy’s blog. I had been tossing around ideas and colors all month. One night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, some fabric popped into my head, and I knew what I wanted to do. The fabric? Some Mardi Gras fat quarters that my friend Angie had sent me a couple years ago. They have cute little masks and fleur de lis on them in purple, yellow/gold and green.

Cousin Kim and I cut the fabric in 4.5” squares and then surrounded them with a 1.5” frame. From the colored “solids” (the yellows weren’t exactly solid, but was what we had) we cut 6.5” squares. 

Our plan was to alternate the solid and framed blocks somehow, but nothing seemed to work quite right. We didn’t want single colored placemats, so this is what we ended up with. We just sandwiched the top and back right sides together and added the same size batting to the back. Then we stitched around, leaving a small hole for turning right sides out and stitched the opening closed as we topstitched the perimeter. Just the same way I make kennel quilts! Anyway, then we took 3.25 minutes to quilt them (hehe). They aren’t the most stylish placemats ever, but they really look nice with my yellow plates sitting on them! Do I have a picture of that? Of course not! That would’ve taken some forethought. 

My last picture is of a possible maybe might happen glacially slow idea that could be a project down the road. Possibly. Definitely not a Squirrel. 

It started when Cousin Kim was telling me that she had an old 2004 magazine that she was recently flipping through that had a pieced quilt project using good old-fashioned chenille  “like they used to make bedspreads out of. Too bad we can’t get chenille like that anymore.” Silly me piped up, “Oh! I have a whole tub of chenille bedspreads and fabric I need to use up! Probably enough for 2-3 quilts at least!” (You know where this is going, right?) 

So, we dropped everything, raided the bin, selected our colors and block size and started cutting. Within a half hour my studio looked like it had snowed. Fuzz everywhere. This is not going to be fast, or even necessarily fun. I predict all sorts of issues sewing thick layers. And quilting it? Oh, I don’t even want to think about it. But we’ll tackle another pile of cutting next week. And I’ll be doing a lot of vacuuming.

Adiós y Vaya con Dios

I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand

Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand

Life is good today, life is good today

From “Toes” by Zac Brown Band (2006) 

Ah yes, that’s been my theme song this week. The mood sums up how I feel about the new Administration, but the title of this blogpost (and the most remembered line of that same song) is probably way more charitable than I’d care to be with the fat orange guy. Anyway, wasn’t Amanda Gorman’s poetic recitation at the Inauguration just amazing? It gives me chills that someone so young can craft words that evoke powerful images and send chills up my spine. 

Well, the new Administration is off to a running start, and I’m about ready to stop running with pink and finish up. It’s all good. This is what I got accomplished this week.

For the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC), I finished up my last two pink quilts that are child donation quilts for Quilts for Kids. That’s makes my total 6 for Pink January, and I am DONE (done, I say!) with pink quilts for this year! 

This quilt of 6” string blocks and other miscellaneous 6” blocks (or pieces of fabric) finished at 42x48”. I quilted it in hooks and swirls.

The backing and binding were from a chunk of yardage that my friend Angie sent me last fall. They are cute little dolls that would’ve made a cute quilt in their own right, but I was well and truly running out of backing fabric!

And the final pink quilt was made from 4” squares (finished) along with some solid pinks for accent. This quilt measures 40x48” and was quilted with vine-y loops. 

As I mentioned, I was running out of backing fabric possibilities, so this was a real hodgepodge of three width-of-fabric bits I had left.

And the other pink sewing was just re-doing some of these square-in-a-square blocks (and adding a few) so that I had 16 edged in white and 16 edged in black. They measure 4.5” in their unfinished state. Originally I had started with 25 white ones. But I have way more black scraps, so after a bit of unpicking and some additional sewing, I feel that these have more potential as I move forward with other colors.

As usual, I’m linking up all my scrappy pinkness to the Scrappy Saturday post at Angela’s blog. Come see how others in the RSC are whipping their pink scraps into shape!

I am working on a table topper to join in the Table Scraps Challenge, which we will reveal next Saturday. But all I’m going to show you is a little peek. It does have a bit of pink shirting in it, as you can see. The full reveal will be next Saturday (after it’s quilted and bound). 

You may recall that last week I showed my center block for the Stay At Home Round Robin (SAHRR). I wasn’t sure if I was going to participate.

Well, the first border was called by Chris and it was piano keys. How could I resist? Yep, I got sucked in. First, I sewed a 1” green stop border around the center block, then added 1.5x2.5” piano keys. I also wanted to add more of the third color (a salmon that you can see in the two green floral prints) so it wouldn’t get lost. They became 2.5” cornerstones. 

The block now measures 18.5”, which may be a little large at this stage of the game. But I can always skip a round or alter/downsize a round, so there’s that. I’m sure this will end up as a gift quilt anyway, because it’s so far a bit too matchy-matchy. But we’ll see where it goes! I’m going to link up to the SAHRR Round 2 Linky Party. 

And finally, I sewed three more of these Wishing Ring blocks from the floral fabric for a total of four blocks. I’ll just sew these until I run out of fabric, then add soft-colored blocks as well. No plans other than to just enjoy the process.

In the coming week I hope to baste and quilt my Zipper quilt so I can count is as a January finish. And if there’s time, I may do another (NOT PINK) kid quilt for Quilts for Kids. I’ve got to go make a delivery of quilts to them because I have about 14 quilts here that I’ve made (and some that I’ve just quilted for others) and I’m out of labels. 

Have a good week, and be safe out there! The virus is still raging. Let’s just sew!!!