Germ-Free Sewing

No coronavirus here! At least not yet. Of course, the panic has set in locally here in the Salt Lake Valley. Last week when we went to the grocery store (we go every Friday), it was business as usual. Everything was in stock, and we personally were in good shape food-wise (and TP-wise) because we always have extra in storage. Yesterday, however, it was nuts! But that’s a story that I’ll save for the end of the post, because I bet you’re here to check out the scrappy sewing.

I’m linking up to Angela’s Scrappy Saturday blog post, where you can join the scrappy crowd without fear of germs!

First up this week was the scrappy basket, using a pattern from Angela (link above) has on her blog. This is the third one I’ve made.

Next up was this Scraptastic Stars block.

Using more small scrappy bits and fabric “crumbs”, I sewed three Beachcomber blocks.

I’ve been making Beachcomber blocks since last year, and I decided it was time to see what they looked like together on the design board.  Hmmmm.... not bad. A bit too much background for my tastes. Maybe I should’ve done the background in black and the dividing strip in white. Oh well, too late now. These blocks are 11” each when finished. I have a couple blocks not pictured here, which brings my total made up to 22 of the 30 I’ll need. I plan to do two yellow, two red and two dark greens in the coming months. The quilt will finish at about 55x66”.

And speaking of quilts, I did quilt two small kids quilts (already sewn by others) for Quilts for Kids. I’m pretty sure that ugly bear fabric and hunter green Swiss dot dates back to the 1990’s. As my friend Mary would say, “it looks like the nineties threw up all over it”.

But let’s talk CUTE quilts. I got the two panel quilts (shown last week) sewn, layered, quilted and bound this week for QFK. The directive was to keep them simple and churn them out. I love how bright and cute they are!

This first one looks a bit wonky at the bottom edge, but it’s not. I just didn’t pin it. It finished at 35x47”.

This second one turned out so cute, finishing at 37x47.5”.

Here is a close-up of some of the quilting.  I also echoed the waves, outlined the clouds, sun, boat and bear, and did a lot of ditch quilting so that everything was secure. The quilt borders consisted of a 1” blue stop border and a 3.5” ducky fabric border. That ducky fabric was purchased a couple years ago from Missouri Star Quilt Company online.

It was so serendipitous that I was able to find fabrics in my stash that closely echoed some of the fabrics in these four blocks. I was able to frame the blocks using colors with the same intensity, feel and style of the panel. 

And those are the finished panel quilts (for this quarter!)

Now, I’m jumping back to aqua/teal for a moment just to show you what I’ll be working on this week. The teal “creature” quilt will use lots of spare parts and blocks and scraps. This is just pinned up on the design board for now. There is still a lot of tweaking to do and additions to make.

Luckily for me, I have some sisterly supervisory help. This is one of the International Sisters blocks that Preeti sent me that has a dark background. I’ve named her Jill B, because of a certain Dr. Jill B that was a total bada** recently. This Sister Jill block will likely have a background transplant, as Preeti decided (and I agreed) that the dark backgrounds, when Sister blocks are put together, make a distracting geometric pattern.

Sister Jill B supervises the Teal Creature Creation!

And after the Creature from the Teal ??? is complete, I’ll get to work on my One Monthly Goal (OMG) for March. And hey, the month is only half over! And if you have any ideas for a Creature quilt name (Creature from the Aqua ?, Creature from the Teal ??, Creature from the Turquoise ??), I’d be happy to hear them. So far I’ve got Aqua Aurora and .... nothing. 

So, let me tell you about our shopping trip yesterday. It’s nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting, but I did want to write it down.  I’m hoping that when I read back on this in a year or five years, that can look back and laugh (and shake my head) at what a crazy time it was....

When we got to the grocery store, the parking lot was packed. Uh-oh. Usually early Friday morning is calm and not very busy. We each took a hand sanitizer wipe (we keep some in the car) because I had a feeling the store would be out of the free sanitizers to wipe down the cart handles and hands. We always use those. And I was right - there were none available. So, with clean hands and cart courtesy of our own preplanning, we set out. The store was almost out of some vegetables, but I realized (as I saw them restocking) that it was just a mini-run on carrots, cabbage and potatoes for St. Patrick’s Day’s corned beef and cabbage. Alrighty, then. We got all the produce we needed.

Moving into the dairy section, everything looking a bit picked over. There was sour cream - if you wanted light. Some eggs. The milk was almost gone, but we use almond milk, so that was plentiful. All the breads, pastas and rices (except bulk) were picked over except the whole grain varieties. Perfect! That’s what we prefer.

I had hoped that there might be some toilet paper or hand sanitizer/anti-bacterial soap so I could send some to my daughter Megan in Seattle. Ha! There was none. Besides, it would’ve probably cost me as much to send it ($30) as it's costing her to get it delivered. And then a light bulb went off for me. The TP/sanitizer shortages are partly panic buying, sure, but many hoarders are creating scarcity so they can resell these items for outrageous profits. To them I say this: I hope you get COVID-19 and that by the time you recover (because I only want them to get sick, not die for crying out loud!) that the market is glutted with TP and you loose your monetary butt in the deal. End of rant.

Social Distancing; the new catch-phrase. We’ve decided to just stay at home and cocoon for a couple (three? four?) weeks. Today is my birthday. My son Ryan’s was last Monday. We usually celebrate them together and the whole fam-damily goes out to eat. But we’re not doing that this year. I will probably make Bruce (and me, I admit) some oatmeal raisin cookies though. :-) I have to do something fun!

So, I’ve been sewing and reading. My CPAP machine (I have sleep apnea) keeps dying and shuts down every third night just to be spiteful. So this week, I am sleeping for three nights with a diagnostic unit hooked up to me. It has sensors (nose/mouth, fingertip, chest strap) to record how I sleep without additional forced air to get all the calculations correct for my new CPAP. But that means I snore and wake up with a very dry and sore throat (my CPAP humidifies the air). Not fun. I keep reminding myself that I’m tired and have a sore throat because I’m not sleeping well because of the damn CPAP, not COVID-19.

Stay healthy, friends. Avoid gatherings. Wash your hands a lot. Keep up to date on the CDC website and try to ignore the blathering from the White House and Capitol Hill. We will get through this together, yet isolated. Thank goodness for the online community, right?  xoxoxo - all germ-free!

Sewing Like the Wind

More snow here this week. And that was great because it gave me a chance to stay indoors most of the week and SEW. And I sewed like the wind!

Let’s talk green. Light and bright greens are the colors this month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I’m linking up to Angela’s blog for Scrappy Saturday. There is so much color and inspiration there from all the participants.

First up for me this week were the string blocks. I had a lot of green strings and ended up with 16 blocks measuring 6.5”.  I sewed these on my back-up machine over last weekend.

On Monday I got a call from the service department that my regular machine, my Bernina, was ready to come home from her annual checkup and tuneup. So we went to pick it up. The service notes told us how they cleaned the inside, adjusted the presser foot tension and reset the internal stitch counter. There were 2.5 MILLION stitches put on the machine in 2019. Holy moley! All Bruce could say was “No wonder there are so many threads all over the house!"

Here are six International Sisters blocks. I’m still sewing these from Preeti’s pattern. Two of them will be for me and the other four will go into wall hangings I’m making for Harambe Humanitarian, a Kenyan non-profit organization that I became involved with when I went to Africa in 2018. The jungle fabric was a gift from my friend Sally.

We interrupt this blog post for an Impurrtant Announcement from Darla. She would like to remind you that any house decoration done with stray sewing threads is vastly inferior to all the beautiful furs she (and brother Alfie) bestow upon us on a daily basis. This concludes our public service announcement.

Ha! What Darla didn’t mention is how she and Alfie happened to notice that I had not totally sealed a ziplock bag with some balls of embroidery thread inside the other day. In a matter of mere minutes, there were two balls of perle cotton missing.  I noticed it when I went to rethread my needle to finish embroidering the cord on this Farm Girl hand mixer block.

You’ll notice that the cord is embroidered with different colored threads. It wasn’t until I’d finished stitching the block that we found the missing thread balls strung all over several rooms. Darla and Alfie looked totally baffled and innocent (but come to think of it, they always look totally baffled and innocent...)

Getting back to green fabric sewing, it was time to tackle some tiny scraps and crumbs. I’ve been wanting to make some of Angela’s scrappy baskets (tutorial HERE) for awhile now, and this is the year that it’s happening. Her tutorial is very thorough and the process came together very easily.  I love it! Thanks, Angela!

Now my green scraps have been liberated from their plastic drawer and henceforth will reside in style in their own little bin. Isn’t it cute? I just quilted it with a simple serpentine stitch. The remaining scraps (no, I didn’t use them all) have lots of room.

And the picture below shows the basket in situ. As I use up fabrics and downsize a bit, there will be room to put the scrap baskets on the shelves with the folded fabric by color. At least, that’s my theory. Im hoping that by the end of the year I can use the emptied set of plastic drawers to stow the sewing supplies that are currently in a big, heavy desk that I want to get rid of.

So, I’ll be making these scrap baskets every month for awhile!

Once those projects were done, I began playing with green orphan blocks and green scraps from the Parts Department. With the bazillion half-square triangles (HST’s) I had, I made several pinwheel blocks. I pulled in 8 green cracker blocks, the 8 selvage log cabin blocks from last week, 10 of the 16 string blocks and various other parts. The goal is to get some sort of cohesive quilt out of this mess. The color will help tie it together, but so far the only part that’s actually sewn are the 8 central cracker blocks with the little checkerboard trim between them and the white strips along the side. Everything else is just pinned.

This block play will get some attention this week, but I know one thing for certain. Somewhere in there I have to add a pop of a different, unexpected color. I don’t know what that color will be - red? purple? orange? blue? We’ll see as this moves along.

I have a lot more to share, but I’m going to cut this post off here. I’ll be back in a couple days to show you more sewing stuff, not the least of which is a couple quilt finishes. Have a great weekend!