A Round-Up of Finishes

As I may have mentioned, I didn't make that many new quilts while I was on hiatus from blogging this past year, but I did finish up a few.  I'll show you those today.  And in a future post, I'll bring you up to speed on the couple of new quilts I've made since then.

Back in January 2019, I had gotten this small quilt to the flimsy stage.  I'm calling it Get Happy, because the hubs thought the colors and shapes were reminiscent of the Partridge Family television show intro from the 1970s.  Since it has a little bluebird (of happiness?) on the top, I thought why not.  So Get Happy it is.

I did some wavy quilting in the mostly white horizontal strips using one of the decorative stitches on the Brother.  Then I did a dense meander in the black areas...with black thread...which had me straining to see where I was going and where I had been with the quilting.  Had to take my glasses off and get real up close and personal with what was happening under the needle.  I am pleased to report no facial features were harmed in the process.  What a relief, because I would hate to have had to change the name of the quilt (Get Stitches just doesn't sound as nice)!

For the bluebird, I practiced doodling on paper a way to quilt the bird with a continuous stitch from eyeball to tail feather to wing.  It worked out pretty much like I'd planned, although not on the first attempt.  But that's why they make seam rippers. 

By the time I got to the leaves (or petals), my previously doodled idea for those went out the window and I did a more straightforward kind of thing in pastel multicolored thread and called it a day.

Late last fall, I finished up this plaid lattice quilt top with a simple meander.  

The top is from thrifted plaid shirts, and I pieced the backing out of a couple other fabrics I'd found on previous thrifting adventures.  It turned out pretty cozy.  I gifted it to a friend who was moving away. 

I've also gotten a couple of quilts back from my longarm quilter in the past few months. 

In February of this year, I finished up the Carolina Chain quilt and gifted it to my niece Krystal.  (My plan is to give each of my nieces and nephews a quilt, and I have several more to go.)

Last month, I got the Blooming String Baskets quilt back.  I put the binding on it right away so this one's officially done, too. 

Not sure if I will gift this one or keep it.  I'm leaning towards the latter, but we'll see.  I really like it!

I think that about brings things up to speed with the flimsies finished since 2019.  I've got one more quilt top at the longarmer, the Friendship 360 which began as a quilt-along in 2016.  I'm looking forward to getting that one wrapped up as well, hopefully soon!

Finishes and Starts

During the past couple of months, I finished the Carolina Chain quilt top.

It is patiently awaiting its trip to the longarm quilter at the moment, along with another one.  They have to age just right, you know!  :)

After that, I started a quilt to use some of my many (many, many) thrifted shirts. I had a bag of strips and shirttails left over from the Plaid Circles string quilt.  

The inspiration was a quilt by Nannette of New York. I thought it would be a good way to use up my extra strips in the centers of the blocks.

Here is a progress photo as of mid-November.  I have since finished piecing it and have begun webbing the top together.

That's been temporarily interrupted this week, however, with a little string quilt project I started, using the bin of black and white strings.

Some of these strings are eight or more years old, and they've been used in various other quilts. Like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.

So they've been around the block several times, and are ready to be retired into this project, I think.  It should finish off a lot of them, and that makes me happy!

My inspiration is this quilt, "Hope for Tomorrow," found in the book Simply Strings by Rana Heredia.

I'm following the pattern more or less just roughly.  My available strings are dictating the size of the piece, which will hopefully end up being a nice sized wall hanging.  I'm a-okay with that.

Sunday Sundry 5-6-18

Spring has finally arrived, all of a sudden it seems.  Hard to believe that this was the backyard view just two and a half weeks ago.

Now the landscape has transformed into a sea of green, dotted with golden daffodils, dandelions, hyacinths, tulips, etc. 

(Mallards enjoying the new greenery and mud puddles at the park.)

I've done a little raking, some mulching, but no digging in the dirt quite yet (it's been pretty wet).  Looking forward to it, though.

Went for a walk and gained 10 pounds...
 
One glorious spring morning this week, as I hiked through the neighborhood enjoying the bird songs on the warm breeze, I noticed it must also be that time of year when the city crews pick up random household items, the stuff that doesn't go in the usual trash bin.  There were various piles sitting at the curb as I passed through the blocks.  Broken bed frames, pet-ravaged furniture, damaged dressers, ancient plastic flowerpots, etc.

Coming up on my walk in one such pile were a couple of hard-used Coleman coolers and shattered shelving unit.  As I got closer, however, something else caught the corner of my eye.

Sitting on the ground in an open cardboard box were two crocks, a smaller brown one nested inside a larger light colored one.  I stopped and removed the smaller crock so I could hoist the larger crock out of the box, because it looked like it could be—why, yes indeed it was—a Red Wing!

If I had been thrifting in a store, this would have been a "Start the car!" moment—when you find something too good to be true.  Your insides are jumping up and down, but you keep a poker face, play it cool, and make a beeline for the checkout and the safety of your getaway vehicle.

Back at the curb, it was 10 seconds, tops, and I was scuttling back down the sidewalk on my way home, now 10 pounds heavier, cradling a dirty, paint spattered crock.

A quick bath and a couple minutes with a razor blade to remove the red paint (talking about the crock here), it was spiffed up and ready for some "after" shots. 

I was expecting to discover at least a hairline crack or a chip or two, but it was pristine!  Now it's ready for some spring flowers—if I can bring myself to fill it with dirt, that is.  Maybe I'll find a pot that will fit inside.

What I couldn't quite throw away...

I was tidying up in the sewing room the other night when I grabbed what remained of Dad's three ties and took a couple steps toward the garbage can with them.  But then I stopped and laid the silky fabric back down.  Just toss it already and move on.  But am I really done with it?  There isn't much there to do anything with.  It was late, I was tired, so decided to sleep on it.

The next morning, I was still on the fence, but I started playing with the pieces on the table, like a jigsaw puzzle.  I laid out what could be sewn together into a slab of "made fabric" and then started doing just that.  Thinking this was probably an exercise in futility, but at least I'd spend a few more minutes playing with it, and mentally processing, before tossing it out, and maybe that's all I needed to do.

Eventually I had two slabs, each a little smaller than a sheet of paper.  I happened to have a 6.5-inch square ruler on the table and put that down on top of the slabs in various ways, looking through it like a camera lens for an interesting vignette.  

Finally, I cut a square from each slab.  The center of a wonky star, perhaps?  Maybe I could even squeak out some of the star points from the leftover bits from the slabs?

So that's what I did, using Dad's shirt scraps for the blue background and red star points.

And today I made a second one with the other center square from ties, the rest from shirts.  My thought is to make two 18-inch pillows from these big blocks.  I've got a large piece of denim from one of Dad's shirts that will make a great pillow back for one of them.  I'll rustle up something else for the other.

I guess reconsidering the fate of the ties was a good move after all.

There's a chain a-coming...

I also started cutting strips for a Carolina Chain quilt, a Bonnie Hunter/Quiltville free pattern, which can be found HERE. 

Started sewing a couple of these together, just to see how it might go.  Sometimes I have doubts about whether my "lights" and "darks" are going to work together overall.  That ever happen to you?

You wonder, will it be okay or just a beautiful mess?  After putting a few together, I'm ready to trust the process and let things take their course.  So we'll see.

Housekeeping and a boo-boo...

I checked my email subscription list for this blog last week and was surprised to find that during the time I had not been blogging much during the first part of 2018, over 1,000 new email subscriptions had been added.  Why all the sudden interest in this small, semi-neglected corner of the blogosphere, I wondered? 

Turns out, on closer analysis, these seemed to be bogus email addresses all ending in @outlook.com, likely planted by a bot of some sort.  A little maintenance/housekeeping was going to be required to remove these.  The bummer was, I was going to have to delete each and every one of the bogus addresses by hand, all 1,000-something of them.

But I did that over the course of a few days, a few hundred at a time.  Unfortunately, at one point I got a little carried away in the rhythm of it (click delete, enter okay...click delete, enter okay), and I accidentally removed a handful (maybe about 4) legitimate email subscribers.  If you have received this blog post in your email, you were not one of them, so no worries.

However, if you subscribed to the blog by email between February 19 and the third week of April, and you aren't seeing this post in your email, I sincerely apologize and ask that you kindly take a moment to re-subscribe. 

The bogus email subscriptions have no effect whatsoever on legitimate subscribers.  It's just something I need to be aware of and handle on my end if it comes up again.

As always, thank you all so much for reading!