Forever in Blue, Jean

I’ve had Neil Diamond’s song “Forever in Blue Jeans” running through my mind today. (You’re welcome for the ear worm). Referring to the punny title of this post, I don’t even know if there’s a Jean who reads this blog. And I don’t want to be in blue forever anyway. But for this month, those of us participating in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are concentrating on our darker blue scraps, from mid-range all the way to navy. And black or other dark neutrals if we have time. Angela is hosting Scrappy Saturday again and we’re glad that she has missed the worst of Hurricane Florence. But the inundation of the Carolinas is underway. If you live there, I hope you’re safe and dry.

Last week I forgot to post a picture of my some of my blue sewing. So, here’s the remedy for that. Selvage Squares - 17 at 6.5” and 3 at 4.5”. 

And as often happens. the Block Lotto block for the month of September happens to be the same color as the Rainbow Scrap Color - blue in this case.  Here are my two blue blocks. Aren’t they cute?

These are for donation to the group because I was one of the winners of the California Poppies blocks last month. Forty blocks toward a bright quilt! Stay tuned.

Moving along, I made the remaining four blocks I needed to complete the next round in the All You Need is Love quilt I’m making for my daughter Megan. Three “lollipops” and one friendship star.  

The lollipops on the left side are sewn to the main piece; the rest of them and the stars are just stuck up on the design board.  I will finish sewing that round and then put it away until later in the month or perhaps October.  But for fun, I pieced a few of the black and white checkerboard squares that will comprise the next round. What do you think..... will that be OK? Or should I do it in navy and white??

The hearts, all 54 of them, were pieced when we had the pink RSC month, so by the end of October I should have the next two rounds added on. The final row after that is an 8” block, yet to be decided. I’ll get more serious about it during the 4th quarter, since it’s a Christmas present.

I was playing with the collage maker that’s installed on my iMac, getting used to its functions since all the other free sites have either changed to paying sites or are so gooped up with ads and crap that they’re virtually unusable. 

Anyway, remember that awful block I pieced last week - my wacky take on this month’s lovely Squared Away block? Let me refresh your memory.... see the mess block at right? Well, when I put it into a collage maker, with just three blocks across and four down, with a bit of turning, it looked like this:

That might really look nice with more blocks - a full-fledged quilt. I’m going to at least tuck away the idea.

So what did I work on all week if there are no more blue blocks?  Well, I finished two quilts! YAY!!!

This is a safari-themed baby quilt that measures 46.5 x 55”. It went together so quickly! The fabric (all except the yellow) is an older line, Origami Oasis, by my favorite designer, Tamara Kate. I love the green block stuck in there with the blue. I truly was one block short of the blue (didn’t want to cut into the leftover stripe for the back) and had just the one green block.

I franken-pieced the batting, and quilted it with straight diagonal lines. Here’s the back.

It’s meant to be a gift for someone, but I’m not sure we’ll be getting together. So, it may end up in the donation pile.

My second finish was Linked Squares. All I had left to do on this one was finish the second half of the quilting, which I did last Sunday, and then bind it. 

Linked Squares finished at 64x80”. The binding is a great black and white stripe, and the backing fabric is a piece of abacus fabric I picked up somewhere on the cheap to use for an RSC quilt back. This was my Finish Along Quarter 3 goal #2 (see list HERE).

I’m planning on this being a donation quilt, but will wait and see if anyone else in the family asks for a quilt this year. 

And since we’re working with blue, I’ll add these pictures of my brother Steve’s hot rod, Hellion (named for our mom, Helen, who loved being called Hellion). Steve got all his stuff packed, loaded and delivered home right on schedule. 

Here’s one side of the 1930 Model A, looking from our front porch out to the street where it’s loaded onto a trailer.

And the other side of the car, looking from the street back to the house. Hellion had a rumble seat, but it’s been removed to accommodate something or other. Personally, I prefer accurate restorations, but Steve is all about hot rods and dragsters.

Now that Steve and his stuff are gone, I’ve got two guest rooms that will be getting refreshed over the next few months. The bedrooms, which are both along the front of the house, will get new double- or triple-paned windows. That will complete the replacement of all the windows upstairs, and all that’s left for next year is my studio window and a new screen door my studio outside door. 

Also, we'll be ripping up the carpet in the yellow “girly" bedroom so that the hardwood floor there will match the “African” bedroom/library and the hallway. Then I’ll have the ceiling, closet doors, and wood trim painted white (from the existing gray). I’ll complete that refresh by painting the wood-grain ceiling fan white and making a new quilt and jelly roll rug.  In the African bedroom, there are two walls to retouch or repaint since the futon we gave to Steve really scratched up the walls. I’m getting tired just planning it all..... the older we get, the more happy I am to pay someone else to do the work!!

Two Quilt Finishes!

Now that Groovy Guitars is done and out of my quilting queue, I’ve hit the ground running to finish up other in-process quilts. This week I finished up both a little baby donation quilt and my longest-standing UFO (unfinished object) - my Farm Girl Vintage quilt!!

Let’s start with Farm Girl. I started this back when Lori Holt did her quilt-along, at least 3 years ago. I had chosen the 12” size rather than the 6” size because I was a fairly new quilter at the time. And frankly, I had issues with HSTs and flying geese and keeping points and maintaining proper seam allowances and .... and....

But with time and practice, my skills improved, even to the point where I was able to put these sometimes-wonky blocks together into a cohesive whole. Yes, it’s readily apparent that I now need to work on my photography skills....

Farm Girl finished at 70x82”, and I quilted it with loops on my Bernina. I would say that this size is about the limit of what I’m comfortable wrangling with on my home machine.

The backing is a farm print I bought on clearance at Connecting Threads last year, and I also used almost all its remnants to make a matching binding. Many of my favorite blocks are not represented in the 30 I chose for this quilt because they were used in the Autumn Sampler quilt I finished last January (see this post).

I still have leftover Farm Girl blocks and will probably make a donation quilt from them. They’re currently making friends in the Parts Department.

The other quilt I finished this week is a donation quilt made from a charm pack of Horizon by Kate Spain, a few extra solids and some leftover oatmeal-colored background fabric. It finished at 41x46” after washing and shrinking.

Today I’m linking up with Sarah for Whoop Whoop Friday and Alycia for TGIF (Thank Goodness it’s Finished) Friday.

These were also goals on my Quarter 3 Finish-Along post. Although I didn’t link up with the hosts (and am therefore ineligible for prizes this quarter. I was in Africa at the time.), I am using the QAL as motivation to check items off my list. The Farm Girl quilt was #9 on my list and the donation quilt was #6. You can see my goal-setting post HERE.

Wrapping up the Rainbow

As I write this (Friday evening), it’s snowing. Now that is not necessarily unusual here in the Salt Lake Valley at the end of April, but I’m just a bit paranoid; did we miss summer? It’s been raining and slushing all week. I’m sure that if my garden could talk, it would be saying (and here I paraphrase...) "What the Heck?!" The cats have stopped shedding (for now), the furnace is still running, soup is sounding good for dinner, and quilts - well, they always sound good. To console ourselves, we’ve been watching a BBC series on Netflix about the South Pacific. Bonus: it’s narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch. (If you don’t know who he is, it’s time to sell that rock you’re living under, LOL).

We have come to the end of our multi-colored/rainbow scraps for the month of April. Our intrepid leader, Angela of So Scrappy, is again hosting another linky lineup of scrappy fabric goodness. It’s so much fun to see what our online quilting friends have been up to!

So this was my creative week. First, I finished up the pastel rainbow baby quilt from my vintage sheet scraps. It finished at 42x42”. It’s hard to get a good picture of a pastel quilt. I quilted it with simple straight line cross hatch. Well, MOSTLY straight lines, hehe. This will be a donation quilt.

Next I took an afternoon to work in some bright, multi-colored cat-themed scraps and quilted up 6 cat quilts (roughly placemat sized) for Best Friends Animal Shelter. The picture includes one I made from the leftover fabric of my bee-themed baby quilt, so there are 7 kitty quilts altogether.  Most of them are from my precious Laurel Burch scraps.

My Flower Market quilt finally came together, and much more easily than I thought it would. The borders worked out perfectly! I actually like the finished quilt.  It measures 61x72”.

Sorry I have to keep taking pictures of finished quilts up on my design board. I`d sure love a sunny day so we could get outside. Anyway, the back is a yummy black print with white and pink flowers and little white polka dots. It is my favorite print of the line. And the binding is a diagonal black and white stripes because Stripes.Are.The.Best.

This is also my Goal #1 for my Finish Along Goals for Second Quarter, list HERE.

Now, let’s take a look at what got done in April in the name of Rainbow Scrap Challenge, shall we?

Surprisingly to me, I completed 72 multi-colored blocks. Of those, 43 went into the Scrap X+plosion quilt (42 on the front and one on the back), then there were 16 quarter log cabins (upper right in collage), and 13 4.5” bowties blocks (center bottom). I also did one rainbow baby quilt, 7 rainbow kitty quilts and 2 rainbow doggie beds. (Had to correct myself there; I first typed doggie bags).  So, it was a very productive month, which proves how crappy our weather has been because everything happened INDOORS.

And finally, I finished the top (only had to trim and add borders) of the Big Game Quilt that I’m making for our DSIL (daughter Emily’s husband) who has returned temporarily from his overseas assignment for the USAF. He has a month leave of absence, during which he is taking a special class and setting up for his new posting and training beginning in July (in nearby Colorado!!) He will go back overseas for about six weeks and then be stateside for good. So, I wanted to give him his Christmas present for 2016 since he was overseas) while he`s here. We’ll finally get to spend some time with the whole sweet family next week!!

This quilt is a printed design panel from Pattern Jam, just like the one I did at Christmas for my other DSIL, only a different color way. This time I was able to pick out the fabrics and colors. The printing has improved dramatically - I can’t believe how crisp and bright the colors are! The two borders were added by me yesterday, and the backing is the same navy blue and green plaid fabric of the outer border. I think even the binding will be the same. That was a great purchase at Connecting Threads for $2.96 per yard.

Not much else is new around here. Bruce may go back to work next week part-time. We’ll see; he will need to pull his nose out of a book long enough to call and arrange it!

Workin’ on a Scrap Gang....

Do you remember the sixties song “Workin’ on a Chain Gang” by Sam Cooke?? He was so awesome! Listen here or just remember..... you’re welcome for the ear worm.  Anyway, that’s been my theme song while sewing this week. The more we sew - and I sew a lot - the more scraps we seem to accumulate. I also spent lots of time this week (but not nearly enough) outside pulling weeds, working on the Weed Gang. But it’s all good. That is, the sewing is good. The weeds, well, I’m hoping I can bribe some high schooler to come pull weeds for $$$ this summer.

So what did I get done this week on my Scrap Gang Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects? A lot, actually. After finishing Scrap X+plosion last week, I continued working on my quarter log cabins until I was nearly out of multi-colored scraps.

I made 16 blocks. There are no current plans for them; they’ll just reside in the Parts Department until a use comes along. The blocks measure 6.5” each and all have a purple starting square. I have no idea why I picked purple. Anyway, the few scraps that remain were either thrown into the stuffing bag (if they were small) or returned to the scrap basket, which is now an echo chamber of near-nothingness.

And I had so much stuffing in my stuffing bag, (scraps of fabric and batting that would normally go into the trashcan) that I decided to make a couple doggie beds from the pattern by Vickie Welsh. It used all the stuffing that I’ve saved for the last couple months. The fabric is some that I still had in my home dec fabric tub from which I used to make purses and aprons. They rather fit the multi-colored theme this month, don’t they? I guarantee their stuffing contents certainly do! These doggie beds will be added to the cat and small dog quilts I make every month for the Best Friends animal shelter.

And then I made a quick baby quilt from the fabrics left over from a previous baby quilt made a couple years ago. Nothing particularly exciting, but it was fun to get the bits together into some kind of cohesive design.

Another fun part for me was using the quilt to practice quilting free motion flowers. I also did random loops to imitate the bee flight paths shown in the yellow bee fabric.  I can now safely add flowers to my quilting “repertoire”, such as it is.

But there was still more week left....... so I put on my thinking cap and realized I still had a bag of multi-colored scraps left over from my last vintage sheet quilt, Rainbow Rails.  I sorted them out and there were enough multi-colored pastel florals and stripes to make another baby quilt.  So, I cut them into 6” squares and used 42 to make a quilt top.

The picture doesn’t do justice to the soft colors. I was also able to cut out 42 squares of blue-purple-green vintage sheet fabrics for my cousin Kim, who needs to do a quick boy baby quilt.. And, I believe there are enough pink and orange and yellow scraps to get one or possibly even two more baby quilts cut. I`ll deal with those when we get to either one of those colors in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Bruce and I went to JoAnn Fabrics this week. He is finally driving again, and it is so nice! I got some sewing machine needles with a 50% off coupon, some American Girl doll clothes patterns (on sale for $1.99 each) to make some more cute doll clothes for my DGD Abbie, and I also bought a cheap poly batt for the donation baby quilt. It was, like $5, so it convinced me that I shouldn’t cut into my good, wide roll of batting.

And then I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to get back to my Flower Market quilt and making the borders. I got all the flying geese made and trimmed and there are just enough to make the border around the quilt -  IF I use cornerstones. I checked through my scraps and there were 4 black floral print squares already cut and waiting. Meant to be!

So, I hope to have two quilt finishes this coming week, and then I can start on the cat quilts for the shelter. I’d like to make about eleventy thousand of them; enough to justify another trip to the shelter to unload them and the two doggie beds. Yep, this is life in the fast lane, I tell ya.......

Have a great week!
Linking up to Scrappy Saturday at Angela’s for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.