Tomatoes, Onions, Squash and Orange String Quilt Blocks

Actually, I don’t need to write a blog post today, because the title pretty much sums up my week. OK, OK, it’s not everything that happened, but it’s not far off. There were also friend visits, family visits, and we’re going out to eat outdoors again this evening with family. I’ll be attending another Quilts for Kids workshop today (masked and socially distanced). I’ve been asked to be prepared to demonstrate quilting with a domestic sawing machine if any newbies join us, but other than that I’ll probably just work on strings. 

The great news here at Chez Kizerian is that the carpet installers will be here at 8:00 a.m. sharp on Monday to trim and re-stretch the carpet in my studio. YAY! Then we can shampoo the carpet and move back my furniture and sewing stuff and finally put the storms and flooding of Summer ‘21 behind us. We’ll have to hang the wood blinds and shop for storage pieces, but at least I’ll have my Stuff back where I can see it and get to it!

This was The Week of Strings. Orange is a color that I love and use a lot in my quilting. It’s also a great gender neutral color and I get a lot of donation scraps to work with from the Quilts for Kids members. So I decided I would make one orange string quilt to use up a bucketful of strings and strips. I sewed 56 blocks (6 ½” unfinished) for a 7x8 layout that will measure 42x48” when finished. 

The center strip of each block is an off-white strip that I cut from a piece of yardage. It lends (or will lend when it’s all sewn up) a subtle lattice design to break up the orangeness. I couldn’t fit them all up on the exposed portion of the design board, so the remaining blocks are pinned up in clumps on the left. But you get the idea. The design board will be re-covered with fresh new flannel probably on Wednesday when Cousin Kim comes to sew. 

Then I sewed up 16  5.5” waffle blocks, which in turn were combined into four larger blocks of four each.This completes all the blocks I need for this Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC) quilt. Although next month’s color will be lime green, I don’t need any more green blocks, so I can assemble this quilt  sometime over the next 2-3 months.

But that’s wasn’t all. I also stitched up these “chips” blocks (4.5” unfinished), which I am SO not crazy about. These 17 blocks bring my total to 180, which is thankfully all I need. 

I don’t have a setting plan for these yet, but they’re now in the stack of RSC blocks to be finished into quilts, along with the waffle blocks and the kitty blocks from last week. 

Kat of Kat and Cat Quilts has called out this block and these colors for the September-October block drive  for Covered in Love.  So since I have lots of orange scraps, I made four 12” blocks (finished size). They will be sent off to Kat this coming week.

I still have some four patches and crumb blocks to work on, to say nothing of assembling the orange string quilt and another orange-and-yellow quilt from scraps and orphan blocks. Once the studio is up and functional again, it will be pedal to the metal to finish up as many quilts (and use as many scraps as possible) until the end of the year.  To that end, I’ll be joining Devoted Quilter on Instagram for her WIPS-B-GONE 100-day challenge.  (WIP = works in progress). I’m going to shoot for 20 finishes in the 100 days between September 23 and the end of the year. Wish me luck!

That about wraps it up for now. This coming week will be another busy and exciting one here. I hope yours is a great one too!

I’m linking to Scrappy Saturday.