by Nancy
It was another scrappy Saturday here, and I continued working with blue scraps as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I’ve made quite a few more 3 inch rail fence blocks:
I also started sewing my 2.5 inch squares together to make a 10 inch (finished size) square. My thought is a scrappy, dark quilt that can be used at soccer games to stay warm.
by Nancy
A blog I like to read, So Scrappy, has a Rainbow Scrap Challenge, where each month you are encouraged to piece something with a particular color of scraps. May is blue – bright blue. So, I spent a little time with my 1.5″ strips of bright blue scraps this afternoon. I don’t have a specific plan for these 3″ rail fence blocks yet, but I’m thinking maybe something along the lines of this pattern from Red Pepper Quilts:
by Nancy
On a happier note than my last post, I finished machine sewing the binding onto my flower placemats. I just looked back and realized that I never posted a picture of them, so here they are without the binding:
There are 6 of them, 2 in each color way. I have hand-stitched the binding to the back of 2 of them so far and plan to work on the rest of them tomorrow at Quilting Ladies. Here’s a look at one finished placemat:
Since that was done, I used some of my scraps to piece these blocks. The block is called Plaid and is 10″. (It’s the September 15 block for those who have the perpetual quilt block calendar.) It uses 2.5″ squares and 2.5″ by 4.5″ rectangles, and since a lot of my scraps are those sizes, it’s a good one for me. No definite plans for their use yet – just playing with fabric.
by Cathy
So, flush from the completion of a longstanding UFO, I decided to take Nancy’s advice and work on something for me — in this case, an even more longstanding UFO, the famous Quiltmaker Mystery Quilt. (Which Ann finished so long ago that it now hangs on the wall in her cottage. Overachiever.)
When last we checked, my version of the Mystery Quilt stood here.
Then, a baby intervened, which gave me a convenient mechanism for tracking how long it had been since I worked on the project. Five and a half years later, I finally dug it out of the Crafty Closet to see what state I’d left it in, and discovered that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in a flurry of quilting (aided by a young man’s desire to build with Legos in my study, which is handy), and I’ve been able to complete the Log Cabin-izing of the four smaller blocks, as shown below (the white envelope in the middle is so that I could do some color correction in Photoshop);
They’re beautiful, don’t you think? I’m so proud of myself for getting so much done in such a short period of time!
They’re also a full quarter-inch too small in both dimensions.
Argh! ArgharghargharghARGH.
I don’t have enough fabric to make the outer strips a quarter-inch larger, and that would look pretty weird anyway. So, I’m going to take each one apart and re-sew them with ever-so-slightly-smaller seam allowances, and hope I can do better. Tune in again in, well, a few weeks or a month or two. 🙁
by Cathy
I posted a little while back when I’d finished the top for this quilt, but now it’s completely done!
(Shown here with the feet of the intended recipient.)
It really is all scraps — which led to some, er, creative piecing choices for the backing:
And here it is, deployed so that some stuffies can take a nap:
Now the question is: what should I work on next?
by Cathy
So for a Certain Someone’s first(ish) birthday, I finished a wall hanging quilt (see here). There were a lot of scraps left over, so for his fifth(ish) birthday, I put a bunch of them together into a scrap quilt:
It’s actually taken me several years to put this together, and I’m rather pleased with it! I also now understand why quilts usually use blocks larger than 1″ square: it takes a lot of 1″ square blocks to make a quilt of any decent size!
Now I need to put together a backing (also from scraps, I think) and quilt it. I’d like to quilt it on the diagonal along the lines made from the pink and green squares. I could do this with pink and green thread on top, but then there would be pink and green lines of stitching going through the focus print squares, which I don’t think would look good, so I’m wondering about trying my hand at invisible monofilament thread for this one, which I’ve never used before.
Does anyone have any tips or tricks for working with it? My sewing machine can be tetchy about tension and such, so I’m a little trepidatious about trying it. I suppose Tip #1 is “Always do a test swatch first.” And where does one buy this thread — can you get it at Joann’s, or do I have to visit my Local Quilting Shop to find it?
It’s starting to get chilly here, so I finished my card trick lap quilt just in time for it to be put to good use.
by Nancy
Wow! Yesterday at Quilting Ladies I finally did the last hand quilting stitches for this wall hanging. I have been working on it for such a long time – the tulips were my very first attempts at hand appliqué! I hand quilted lots of little tulips in the four corners, which took forever, but once I had started, I couldn’t really quit. But the good news is it is finished and now I can work on the binding!
by Nancy
I started this paper piecing project quite a while ago. Then I stopped because it was A LOT of paper piecing, and I got tired of it. Then, after I finished the heart bibs, I was looking at my list of other things I’d like to make. One is a spring table cover for the table by our front door. I was looking through fabric and patterns for inspiration and remembered this paper piecing project. So, I dug it out of the box of unfinished projects in the basement and took a look at it. I don’t really want to do more paper piecing, but I might put together what I’ve got with some background fabric and see what I’ve got…
by Nancy
Thanks to Isaac, we had a rainy afternoon, so I spent some time finishing up the yellow and orange heart bibs for the twins. Each one has a yellow heart on one side and an orange one on the other. I used packaged bias binding because, believe it or not, in my entire stash of blue fabric, I didn’t have a big enough piece of solid blue to make the binding. Everything else came from my stash. I’m very happy with how they turned out, especially since this was a crackpotty, make-it-up-as-you-go project. I think if I use this pattern again for bibs, I will add a strip of background to the bottom, though.