First, my apologies for the late post. We are on island time and I lost track of my days! Thank you to Joan for putting all this together! She always has the best groups!
However, I was in a bit of a home unproven work and travel frenzy and my planned project never made it out of the starting gate. However, I did manage a bit of slow stitching on a herd of kitties! Full disclosure, my friend did the creative work on these little guys, I’m just (awkwardly and slowly) doing the final stitching.
Each cat is designed to look like a specific cat. This one is my grand-kitty, Bean.
I also finished three last of three quilts for our friend, Amber. Now that I’ve upgraded to automation on my machine, I’m having fun playing with patterns.
Spring in Oregon always brings so much beauty and we went to the Tulip Festival. I always feel so inspired by all the color!
And, of course, even though I’m on vacation, it wouldn’t complete without a trip to the local quilt shop. The Calico Cat was a fun store with lovely fabrics and a very kind and lively owner.
I used admirable restraint but how could I resist pink batik with turtles? Seriously?
We’ve had a lovely trip and it’s been great just hanging out at the beach and spending time with my daughters.
So, again, my apologies, I’ll share more soon about the protect that didn’t launch but, in the meantime, enjoy the following amazing sewists…
Appropriately, I was listening to Tana French’s new book, the Hunter, this week. A great story set in Ireland was the perfect backdrop for an Irish Chain challenge.
In the end, I made a small single Irish Chain in red and white.
I do have on my “want to make” list a large scrappy Irish Chain but not this week.
Thanks again, to Kim and Trish for a season of challenges that enrich my quilting life.
The Give It A Whirl Blog Hop is this week thanks to the lovely Carol at Just Let Me Quilt. We were challenged to use spinny things. Pinwheels, Dresden Plates, whatever brought the motion, you know?
Well, I knew I had the perfect to lurking around for this one. This was a project that started with one of my oldest UFO’s, the Dresden center. This was my very first applique block from the 1980’s. Later I started adding borders, but the quilt grew a bit longer than wide into a sort of extra long twin sized quilt. Or a lap quilt for someone very tall.
The hop got me pulling this off the stack and onto the long arm. I was all excited to get it bound and finished but my week got derailed by Covid. By the time I was up again, Oregon was putting on its annual “Let me fool you into thinking it’s summer” weekend. That’s when we get lured into thinking there will be an early spring only to get suckered into plant buying. Then the rain will come back until late May! In the meantime, the cats were SO excited. We all enjoyed some fresh air and sunshine.
Be sure you check out the rest of the hoppers…. your head will be spinning with a the great projects!
Last year, I made my first quilt from my husband’s shirts as a PQ challenge and I had hoped to do the second one this week. However, life and sick kitties interfered. So, last night, I took some of the tiniest shirt scraps and made a little log cabin Christmas ornament.
For now, it’s hanging on my bulletin board but I think I’ll make one to go with each quilt.
Happy quilting,
Beth
P.S. Both Winnie and Gizmo are doing OK now.
When you don’t feel good and all you want to do is lay by the heater vent
This week’s prompt was the hourglass…block, shape or other interpretation. This was an easy one for me. I love hourglass blocks. The accuquilt makes it so fast and easy to cut the 1/4-square triangles I need for the blocks.
I had a need for a doll quilt to gift to a new big sister. I decided to go with colors that matched the baby quilt. I used the Accuquilt to cut a fast bunch of triangles. They went together so quickly! I shrunk down the quilting design I used on the baby quilt, too. I’m loving this butterfly and loops.
Here’s the hourglass quilt which measures 18×24 inches.
Here it is next to the baby quilt…
And here it is on the doll bed. I used a Riley Blake stripe for the mattress and pillow and then made a little pillow case to match the quilt. I’m hoping it will be a favorite nap spot for a beloved doll or stuffy.
I was hoping that Gizmo would give it a trial nap but no such luck. He did, however, take a lovely nap on both quilts as I put on the bindings.
Here’s a closeup of the quilting.
Thanks again, to Kim and Trisha for a fun challenge week!
I love February! For a lover of hearts and pink and all things Valentine’s, it’s a beautiful month even if the weather doesn’t agree! Often in the Pacific Northwest, it’s also the time of year we get what I like to call “False Spring.” We get a few days of very pretty, hopeful weather that gets all the gardening people excited…then it settles down to rain for weeks. One of the other things I love is making baby quilts and there are a whole bunch of new babies on the way this spring. I found these adorable animal prints and wanted to capture some of that fresh, spring feel. I quilted it on my Qu’nique 21 Pro with a butterfly pattern that I’ve really been loving lately.
The faces of these animals are so very cute!
And those little paws are otterly adorable!
I am so excited to get this bound and delivered!
The back wall of my cubicle has been giving me the perfect spot to bring some of my smaller quilts out to visit the office. For February, I brought out this heart quilt that I made during a prior season of Project Quilting.
Thanks so much to Joan over at MooseStash Quilting for putting this all together! There’s lots to love on this hop, be sure to check out all these talented folks!
The challenge this week was “Inside Out”. The idea was to take an element that was normallyon the inside and feature it on the outside. Once again, I struggled but half the fun of the challenges is to push yourself creatively. I ended up deciding on two inside out elements. The first was selvages. My early sewing days were in garment construction were the inside of a garment often had selvages. I used to love when a straight edge had a selvage because it meant I didn’t have to finish the edge. (This was in a pre-serger time of my life and, yes, I know it wasn’t good tailoring practice…LOL.)
I decided to make a selvege zip bag because it would be inside-out in two ways, selveges on the outside and the literal turning inside out of the bag.
The bag got a little bigger than I pictured and frankly, I’m not wowed. But, it is a cute little bag and I’m sure it will find a use.
Thanks again to Kim and Trish for a fun challenge!
Gizmo supervised the whole process and I’m sure he’ll test-sleep the bag at the first opportunity and report back.
This week’s challenge was to sky colors but not less than 10% sky blue. I had a million ideas but was very short on time. (I’ve got a t-shirt quilt that’s way overdue.) I had an idea I would have loved to do based on the title “Purp”le Rain” but it would have required a ton of time.
Instead, I used inspireation from our recent ice storm. While we were frozen in place, we were treated to some lovely sunsets over the ice so I tried to capture that in raw edge applique.
You can’t see the details very well but there are three different colors of fairy frost in the bottom
Here’s a picture of our neighborhood looking like a skating rink.
I decided I didn’t want another small wall hanging so I decided to make this one into a pillow. After I had finished it, I was reminded of a story my mom used to tell. She grew up on a variety of small rented farms in Montana. She told me how very still and quiet things were in the depth of winter and how lonely the sound of the train whistle was in the stillness. I wish I had remembered sooner, I could have quilted in a tiny curl of train smoke.
Thanks again to Kim and Trish. It was fun to push myself out of my usual style.
My daughter’s great grandmother was the one who brought the tradition of saying “Rabbit, rabbit” first thing on the first day of a new month. This was supposed to bring luck for the month ahead. I’d never heard of it before and thought it was just a game she played with her grandchildren. Then I ran accross it in a Miss Read novel (which I highly recommend, by the way – quite a charming series about a school teacher in a small English village.) Somehow the tradition got translated from “White Rabbit” to “Rabbit Rabbit” along the way and thus the 1st of every month is referred to as “Rabbit Rabbit Day.” I’m not terrible superstitious but I love the fun of the thought and the connection to past generations. My own grandmother used to rub the newly-cut ends of a cucumber together to “get the poison out.” Of course I rub the end of my cucumbers after cutting them…not as poison control but as a sweet moment of remembering my grandma.
So of course I jumped at the idea to join a White Rabbit Blog Hop hosted by Carol at Just Let Me Quilt! I had the perfect fat quarter bundle just waiting in the wings…Riley Blake’s Down the Rabbit Hole.
I always love a fat quarter bundle. I loving have every piece of a collection and those little bundles are so fun to see arranged on a shelf. The shelf is getting crowded, though, and I was excited to have a little push in the direction of getting this one out to play.
There was clearly a pink and blue thing going on in this stack. I decided to divide them into pink/white and blue. I had some yardage for borders as well.
Last year, during the “Novel” challenge for Project Quilting, I used a fat quarter bundle from “Little Women” to make a log cabin quilt and I decided to do something similar with this collection.
Instead of a regular log cabin, I went with a courthouse steps style
The blocks are a big oversized, finishing at 15″ but that meant I could do a lap quilt with only sixteen blocks. I wasn’t thrilled with the look. I mean, I knew is would be “mushy” in colors but something wasn’t sitting right. I changed the layout to alternate horizontal and vertical placement and I liked it much better!
There are still quite a few white/pink strips left so I think I’m going to try some additional blocks with the blue and pink on one side and the whites on the other. I don’t have a size in mind but I’d love to get this at least four blocks by five blocks.
Many thanks to Carol for helping me move this cute little bundle from shelf ornament to project in progress! Make sure to hop over to all the talented quilters on this list to get a hefty dose of inspiration and, who knows, maybe a little extra luck!
The Pacific Northwest is currently having a weather tantrum. Freezing rain started last Friday with (for us) quite low temperatures. I’ve been quite lucky in that heat and power have stayed on and I’ve been sewing away between cat-holding duties. Gizmo has some arthritis along with his heart issues and uses me as his personal heating pad.
He’ll snuggle until he’s nice and warm and then take over the warm spot in my chair as soon as I get up. He’s more inclined towards a little blanket or dryer- warmed clothes than he once was.
Today, it’s supposed to rain and thaw but so far the rain is just creating a very pretty, but scary, later of ice.
We’ve been told temps are heading for the mid- forties today but it’s just over freezing at my house.
So, winning….I won the fabric giveaway over at The Objects of Design. Molly, the ruling cat, picked these lovelies for me…
I’m so excited as I have a project this year that will test the extent of my blue stash! If you don’t read Sally’s blog, I highly recommend it. She has some great tutorials and her prose is super witty…and there are cats! I never leave without a smile.
So, what does one do with 5 days indoors? Do you need to ask? I spent most of my time in the sewing room….double bonus because heat rises and it’s on the third floor! I’m nearly done piecing a long overdue t-shirt quilt and hope to get it on the frame today. Tomorrow is back to work and next week we are falling down the rabbit hole with the White Rabbit Blog Hop.
Here’s hoping you are warm and safe where you are and that quilty things are happening for you!
Words & Stitches 