I've got to wear shades...

I was working/procrastinating on the Hands2Help quilt a couple weeks ago when I got sidetracked by a baggie full of something good.  Not that kind of baggie full, something totally legal in all 50 states.  Quite possibly as capable of inducing a chill state of mind, but without the paranoia.  Not even of the quilt police.

My friend and fellow quilter Marei and I swapped boxes of scrap fabric a while ago, but to call what she sent me a box of scrap fabric is an understatement.  It was a treasure chest!

Among the rolls of strips all neatly cut to usable sizes were a couple of baggies with notes inside, to the effect of "Have fun!" and "Maybe you can create something with these."

Happily, I did!  I made THIS wall hanging from one bag of bitty-bits.

Recently I rediscovered the other bagful—two-inch "bonus" half-square triangles: the corners you cut off some other project and, if you're like Marei and me, and maybe you, you set aside to use some other time. 

I started pulling the pieces out and arranging them in groups of 16.  They were so cute and colorful!  So I sewed those groups of 16 together into 6.5-inch blocks, as many as I could make.

Now what? 

Well, I could sash them or border them, I thought.  What might I have in the stash for that?  Here's a pretty bundle of fat quarters I won in last year's Hands2Help giveaway.  Let's just open these up a bit and see if any of them might do, color-wise.  

Yes, all of them!  Okay, maybe not the ivory one, but all the rest.

Hm, what if I stagger or offset them?  Then I would only need to border three sides instead of four, and isn't that interesting?

Let's make the two side borders a bit narrower and the longer border wider.  If I cut the side borders 6.5 x 3 and the longer border 11.5 x 3.5, that will make the block finish at 9 x 11 inches.  Seems like a workable size rectangle to make a baby quilt or wall hanging.

And that is the story of how friendship, farting around, and flimsies come together.

It is bright, and I like that.  In real life, it's not quite as eye-searingly bright.  I tried to correct somewhat for the dim light of the basement with so-so results.

Now I'm in the process of making a scrappy back.

How have you used your small bonus half-square triangles?  Do you have some lying around, waiting for inspiration?  Do you toss them or give them away? 

A Flimsy and a Finish

Behind the scenes of this somewhat quiet little blog space, I've been sewing on a few things during the past couple weeks.  Let's catch up!

(The crocuses are popping up!)

I've been following along on Sarah's Nifty-Nines Quilt Along and was inspired to start a nine-patch quilt of my own.  I hit up the stash and pulled a few color combinations that spoke to me in a scrappy kind of way.

Pretty soon I had a design wall of nine-patches.  (That subtle checkerboard pattern is my design wall, which is the fuzzy side of a vinyl tablecloth pinned to the wall.)

Then it was time for some snowball blocks in between those nines, and again I turned to the shelf of stash for a background for those snowballs.  Nothing really spoke to me there, so I started looking in some more out of the way spots in my sewing room, eventually opening a thrift store bag to find this.

A vintage but never used muslin sheet I'd scored at Goodwill sometime in the past couple years.  It's more of a robin-egg blue than the above picture suggests.

I washed it up and cut 9.5-inch squares for the snowball blocks.  A day or two later, I had them all done, and a few days after that, the top was together.  And I had enough sheet left for a pieced backing!

This will be a quilt for Hands2Help, the annual charity quilt drive Sarah coordinates.  I look forward to making something for it every year.  Head over to Confessions of a Fabric Addict to read about this year's H2H Challenge and join in!  It's fun, it feels good to give, and there are prizes!

Recently, Sandy, my local long-arm quilter, brought back two of my quilts.  It is said that "absence makes the heart grow fonder," and I think that's true for quilts.  Especially when they come back beautifully quilted!

This was my living room a few days ago, with WIPs on the floor and furniture.  We manage to navigate along the edge in that narrow walk space—balance training, you know! 

[Aside:  That little corduroy and flannel HST quilt on the left is actually not a WIP; I finished it last year.  The chair is holding a recent thrift store find, one of those "start the car!" moments when I snapped up a piece of salt-glazed Rowe Pottery from the employee cart at Goodwill before it even made it to the display shelf.]

Yesterday, I finished the binding on one of the two quilts that came back from the long-armer.  I had started this 16-patch and X-block quilt last year about this time.  It was one of two 16-patch quilts I made, the other one being donated to last year's Hands2Help charity quilt drive.

This one will stay with me (at least for a while).  I used some gorgeous hand-dyed fabrics by Vicki Welsh in this quilt, on a background of dove gray.

I made two backs for this quilt—which is what happens when you can't remember you've already made the first one.  I gave the second backing to the quilter, and then about six weeks later found the first underneath something in the sewing room!  

I called Sandy to say, "Stop the presses!"  Fortunately, she hadn't started quilting it yet, so I was able to take her the first one, which was my favorite.

That's a little of what's been happening around here.  What have you been up to?

Things in Motion

I went a little crazy at Fabric.com this week.  I was thinking about making a quilt I'd bucket-listed a couple years ago.  There are only three colors in the quilt: green, red, and a neutral background.  So I went online fabric shopping, looking for something that grabbed my fancy, and came upon "Essentials Cosmos."  Hello, gorgeous.

Now, when you only need three fabrics in a quilt, you need quite a bit of each one, as you might imagine.  I've been sewing scrappy for so long, I'd almost forgotten how much yardage actually goes into a quilt.  But I went ahead and ordered what I needed, had a moment of excitement followed by what did I just do? but then recovered my equilibrium.  Until I got the emails.

Email #1:  "Your Fabric.com order has shipped!"  

Yay!

Email #2 (90 minutes later):  "Fabric.com has issued you a refund of $8.42."  

Um, why?  No explanation.

Email #3 (three hours later):  "Fabric.com has issued you a refund of $16.84."  

Now I'm really confused.

So what, I wonder, will come in the box from Fabric.com?  Will I get all of my order?  Sure hope so, but right now it's a mystery.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I made a sample of the block that will be in the new quilt, except the background I'd cut for the sample didn't seem quite right.  Enter Plan B:  I made a strata of neutral strips/strings and cut my template from that.  Much better! 

If this block looks a bit familiar, it may be because it's a variation of the block Sandi had drawn it up in EQ around the time we were finalizing the TML pattern, and it was love at first sight.  I'm excited to be able to start making this quilt soon—hopefully.

I decided my sample block needed to become a holiday wall hanging, so I made some corner triangles of "made fabric" to set it on point.  It was an afterthought to add the narrow stop border, but I really liked it with vs. without.  Of course, then I had to make all of my "made fabric" triangles a little bigger.  

It is now basted and ready to quilt, but I have things ahead of it in the quilting queue, so it'll have to wait a bit.

In other endeavors, I made a quilt backing for the 16-patch and X blocks (aka "Goodnight Irene") quilt from earlier this year.  Here is the back, draped over the ironing board (and other things).

I needed to make the backing it just a bit larger, so I inserted a strip using many of the remaining hand-dyed fabrics from Vicki at Field Trips in Fiber.  I'd used the brighter hand-dyed fabrics in the quilt top, but the fabric for the backing lent itself to the more muted tones.  Every bit as gorgeous, and very autumnal, too.

Now that top and backing can go on vacation to the long-arm quilter, along with the Scrappy Mountains Majesties quilt top.  Things are moving, and that feels good!

Hands2Help Quilt Finish

I finished the Hands2Help charity quilt this past week, and it is boxed and ready to ship off to Emily for Happy Chemo.

This was a really fun 16-patch quilt to make.  My stash seemed to be over-weighted in pink, so I started by pulling some of those, as well as some reds, teals and aquas, and started stitching.

This was started during Sarah's Sweet 16 Quilt Along a few months ago.  I used one of the tutorials she had featured for the Hands2Help Challenge a couple years previous, featuring guest blogger Amanda Jean from Crazy Mom Quilts.  You can find that tutorial HERE. 

I had an idea to use a different fabric in the center for the background fabric.  Both the center background fabric and the outer background fabrics are Denyse Schmidt/DS Quilts.  That's about as "coordinated" as it gets!  There's a little bit of everything else in the 16-patches, which is just how I like it.  

(That reminds me of a song by Dawes: A Little Bit of Everything.  Those guys can write a song that tells a story, folks.  Have a Kleenex ready.)

This quilt finished at 57 x 68.  I quilted it in an overall meander with Aurifil thread in a silvery gray, which blended in nicely.

It's a snuggly one, and packed along with it are wishes of comfort, hope, and love to the recipient.

Linking to:  Whoop-Whoop Friday

Mopped and Basted

Norm mopped the kitchen floor this morning, so you know what that meant?

I could baste a quilt!

And so I did.

I listened to an audiobook while I scrambled around on the floor, taping and smoothing, and poking in my pins. This is a Hands2Help donation quilt, by the way.

I'm on the second to the last in the eight-book Outlander series, An Echo in the Bone, and I'm maybe two-thirds of the way through the book.  Hard to tell with Audible, or at least I don't pay particular attention to how far along I am.

It's been kind of like the story that never ends, partly because I'm a take-my-sweet-time kind of reader/listener (quilter/blogger) with a tendency to distract myself on other things.  Each audiobook is well over 40 hours of narration (actually, two of them were over 55 hours), but that's okay with me because I'm enjoying the ride.  Thanks, Sarah, for giving me the heads up on Outlander a couple years ago!

I binge-watched (twice, in fact) the first eight episodes, which came out on Blu-ray on March 6.  The next season starts tomorrow night on Starz, but since we don't get the Starz channel, I'll have to wait a few months until those episodes come out on DVD/Blu-ray to get my next fix.  Meanwhile, I'll finish the book series.

(Catriona Balfe and Sam Heughan as Claire and Jamie)

I adore all the actors/characters in the TV series.  It is so very well done.  Jamie, Claire, Frank/Jack Randall, Dougal, Colum, etc.—all seem perfectly cast.  Tobias Menzies, who plays dual roles, is every bit as wonderful playing the forlorn Frank as he is the villainous Black Jack Randall. 

(Tobias Menzies as Jack Randall)

And Jamie, played by Sam Heughan, is totally swoon-worthy.  It's like he walked right off the pages of the novel.

The scenery is wonderful, the costumes divine.  So you could say that's been a slight distraction.

Back to reality, though.  I hope you all have a wonderful Easter!

Flimsy

Guess I better blow the dust off the blog and show you this flimsy I finished recently.

This is one of two 16-patch and X-block quilts I've worked on in the past couple months, often known as a "Goodnight Irene" pattern.  This one used a scrappy bundle of beautiful hand-dyed fabrics from Vicki Welsh.

It's about 65 inches square, a nice size for a lap quilt or throw.  I still need to come up with a backing for it.

The other day, I started to pull fabrics for a Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt, a Bonnie Hunter free pattern I've had my eye on making ever since forever, it seems.

You need lights and darks for this quilt.  My light stash is pretty sketchy.  I really dug to the bottom of the bins to come up with what I have here, and I'm on the fence about more than a few of them.  There are two vintage fabrics in the light stack, including a feed sack.  Quite the eclectic group—this ought to be interesting!

I made a sample from one of the light/dark combinations.  Truly used scraps here, just had enough to squeak out a 8.5-inch square from each piece.  

In a recent post at Quiltville, Bonnie talked about not pressing the seams until you had all the blocks made and laid out and ready to sew into rows.  That way you can align and butt the seams the direction they need to go.  Makes sense and I get it—but it's likely to drive me nuts.  (FYI, the sample block seams are pressed.)

There are a lot of things I have no problem procrastinating on, but pressing blocks isn't one of them!

Flimsy and Flotsam

First up, a flimsy.  This is for the Sweet 16 Quilt Along, and it will eventually be donated in the Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge to Happy Chemo.

This was a fun one to put together, although it didn't use nearly as much of the pink stash as I thought it would.  I seem to have a lot of that, for some reason.

As I made the bed today, I thought I'd capture another 16-patch quilt that I made last summer.  This one has brightened my room for a couple months, a very welcome thing this winter.

Then I went rummaging in the closet for the St. Patrick's Day mug rug (by the way, there's a tutorial for that HERE).  Ended up having to drag out the whole cache of mug rugs and minis in the process, because it's never the one right on top when you go looking.  

I could use a better system for storing quilts and wall hangings and smaller things than piled willy-nilly on the shelf of the closet or stacked on the cedar chest (on top of some quilt books on the right, I see; so that's where they went...).

Do you have a system for storing quilts, etc.?

Since the light was decent at that time of the morning, I laid the minis out on the bed.  Now there's a bright bunch, huh?

If that hasn't given you a headache, let me tell you about a dream I had the other night...

Razor Brain
I dreamed I had a routine medical test of some sort, and in the process it was discovered I had a razor blade embedded in the center of my brain!  Now, I know of no "routine" test that includes an x-ray of the head, but just go with me here. 

(Oh, Homer...Not my brain)

The weird thing is I felt perfectly normal.  In my dream, I was back at the medical facility to get more imaging studies done, and I could not wait to find out how it got there!

Which isn't something anyone could tell me, I realized, as the dream became somewhat lucid.  They would look to me for that answer, and I had absolutely no clue!  It's not like you can snort a razor blade up your nose like I snorted that rolled up Flintstones Colorform back in the day.  Even that didn't end up in my brain, but rather went through my sinus, and with a couple more vigorous and somewhat panicked sniffs, I swallowed it.  So it ended up further south, presumably.

These are the things you never tell your parents, by the way, at least not right away.  Fifty years later, maybe (hi, Dad!).  All's well that ends well.  Except for Fred Flintstone, the Colorform.  

Do you remember that heady vinyl smell of Colorforms?  Or the taste of Play-Doh?  Elmer's Glue?  Chapstick?  Just wonderin'...

Anyway, the dream ended without any resolution, unfortunately.  The weird thing is, I'm still curious!

No mystery with this guy, though.

(Sharp mind you got there.)

Sweet 16 QAL Update

After Sarah showed the quilt she made last week using Crazy Mom's tutorial, I was inspired to start another 16-patch. 

I pulled several different red, pink, and aqua fabrics from the stash, plus a couple others.  I put these together the same way as the previous one, sewing 2-1/2 inch WOF strips into sets of four and sub-cutting those into 2-1/2 strips, then selecting four at random (more or less) and sewing those together into a 16-patch.

In one of the tutorial pictures, the 16-patches were shown on the design wall with the outer setting triangles but the middle part was still open, showing the white design wall beneath.  That gave me the idea to use a lighter colored fabric in the center of the quilt.  I used two DS Quilts fabrics (one a 2011 print and another a 2012), and they seemed to work pretty well together.

It is on the design wall now, ready to be sewn together.  I think it has kind of a vintage vibe, no? 

I may add a stop border in one of the red fabrics, and then an outer border in the darker fabric, same as the setting triangles, to make the quilt a little bigger.  If I don't, though, it's a nice lap quilt size as is.  It will be donated as part of the Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge.

Linking to the Sweet 16 Quilt-Along.