Scrappy Mountain Majesties Finish

Last year fellow quilting buddy Marei asked if I wanted to make a Bonnie Hunter quilt along with her.  I was totally on board with the idea, and we picked out one of Bonnie's free patterns that neither one of us had made before.  The Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt was the agreed on choice.

Our flimsies were finished about a year ago (you can see Marei's HERE).  Then mine went off to the local long arm quilter for a few months' vacation.  It came back a few weeks ago and I finished the binding on it.

My trusty assistant and retired husband has a new, legitimate gig as official "Quilt Holder-Upper."  The pay sucks, but there's a decent benefit package.  He seems like a natural.

Sandy did a nice all over, swirly floral quilting motif.

A glimpse of the backing and dotty binding.

In other happenings, we spent a pleasant afternoon at the Museum of Wisconsin Art again recently.  

(Jim Liedtke: A Well-Ordered Society: The Super Rich, The Seemingly Devout, The Rest of Us Poor Day Laborers)

 I'm often drawn to the pieces with a sense of humor.

("Maybe we ain't got culture, but we're eatin' regular"~Carl Sandburg, 1914)

Later that night, unfortunately, I became violently ill and "did an Elvis."  Meaning I executed the King's second most famous move and passed out on the john.  Ba-dum-bum!  

(Love the quote on this one too.)

I can't be sure, but I suspect it was food poisoning.  Which is too bad, because the grilled chicken salad with tequila-lime dressing was one of my favorites at the place where we had lunch.  Not anymore, though.  Not ever again.

(Pat Kroth: Gypsy Rhythm - closeup)

Norm woke to a crashing thud (me too—nothing like coming back to consciousness with the sound of your own fall echoing in your ears).  His first thought was that we were having a home invasion.  As he made his way down the dark hallway to see what was happening, I eeked, "I'm so sick," and he found me lying there on the bathroom floor. 

(Aaron Bohrod: The Shadow)

Long story short, I felt like death for the next 24 hours, and to top it off, I had a contusion above my left eye and stiff neck.  Thankfully, I recovered in a day or two and am very grateful for that. 

(Andrew Acker: Crow Dreaming of Becoming a Man: Will I Still Fly?)

What wakes me up most days lately is a pair of crows, plus a few of their friends, that have taken up residence in our yard.  They often meet for a confab in the big river birch outside my bedroom window.  Starting at daybreak, with the sun barely over the horizon:  "Caw-caw-caw-caw-caw!" and various iterations thereof.  And so on, and so on, and so on.

I first thought they were nesting in the pines far back in the yard, but the other day I hung sheets out on the line for the first time this spring and watched a crow with a beak full of sticks fly into the ash tree right off the deck.  Yep, there it was, the crow's nest, about 40 feet off the ground.

Last spring it was mallards, this year it's crows.  It's going to be an interesting summer!

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!

Marei's Scrappy Mountain Majesties

Friends, I have nothing much to show for myself this week, but a couple of backings pieced and a binding cut.  And the flower bed mulched. 

But fellow quilter Marei got her Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt top done, and that deserves a whoop-whoop!

Marei (pronounced "Mary") doesn't have a blog, but you can check out some of her quilts on Flickr here.  I love what she does with scraps!

Check out the closeup of those black and bright prints.  We've got veggies, robots, flip-flops, florals, geometrics, red lips—how awesome is that!  And that text-y light background keeps the whole thing under graceful control and balanced feeling.

Her dog, Scooter, gives it his wag of approval!

Marei is on a mission to MAKE ALL THE QUILTS!  Well, no, that was me getting carried away.  She would like to make all the Bonnie Hunter quilts that strike her fancy, maybe pick her  top 12 favorites and shoot for one a month.

Did I mention she was delusional?  Just kidding, Marei!  Seriously, though, I think she is a very dedicated and goal-oriented person who loves to quilt and enjoys a challenge, and if she says it, I believe she can do it! 

Linking to the Friday linky party, Can I Get a Whoop Whoop?

Scrappy Mountain Majesties Quilt Top

I finished putting together the Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt top this week.  I was thinking about whether to add a border or not.  As of this moment, I'm leaning strongly towards "not."

It's about 60 x 75 inches and will make a nice-sized lap quilt.

I hung it in front of the sliding door this morning for a stained glass effect.

Pretty cool!

You get the idea.

One more, though.  :)

What makes me happy about this quilt—well, there are lot of things, but one of them—is that I used some interesting pieces of fabric from stash.  I didn't feel like I had enough variety of light fabrics on hand, and I was close to grabbing the car keys and making a dash to the fabric store on one or two occasions, but ultimately my stubbornness about using only stash and making it work won out.

For instance, here you can see a yellow and white background fabric that is actually little yellow dress forms.  That is a vintage feed sack fabric.  I literally had to remove the chain stitching along the side of the sack to open it up before pressing and cutting into it (I'd soaked and washed it a while back after I first brought it home).  I'm guessing it's from the 1940s or '50s.

The crossed Native American drumsticks print was a vintage cotton curtain I found at a flea market about five years ago.  Then there is a blue and yellow men's shirt fabric among the light fabrics.  Both the sun/moon print and the Kelly green are thrift store finds.  I also used the reverse side of a yellowish-tan fabric as one of the lights, because it was a more compatible shade of ivory versus the right side of the fabric.

I'm so glad my daughter helped me see that putting the pieces together by color could work nicely.  I didn't follow her idea to the letter, but it got me thinking along that line instead of the random way I had intended to go with the piecing.

This is a free Bonnie Hunter pattern, Scrappy Mountain Majesties, which you can find at Quiltville HERE.

I'll be linking to Whoop-Whoop Friday at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

Random Sandwich

I am working on the Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt, and it is coming together nicely on the design wall.  I have two more rows to add, plus borders.

Fellow quilter Marei is making one too.  It was her idea, in fact, that we pick a free Bonnie Hunter pattern that neither of us had made yet and make it simultaneously.  I happened to have a few on my bucket list and thought it was a great idea!  Marei doesn't have a blog, but perhaps she will upload some progress pics to her Flickr page at some point (hint-hint). I have seen a sneak peak of her blocks and they are awesome!

These blocks are so fun and quick to make.  I am using all stash and scraps for this quilt.  Some of the light fabrics I'd pulled turned out to be a little too busy, though, so I've had to cull a few and get creative with the remainder, including:

• a vintage cotton curtain found at a flea market a couple years ago
• a feed sack fabric, still in the shape of a sack until I cut it apart for this project
• two thrifted men's shirts
• a quilting cotton that was a little too yellowish-brown a print on its right side, so I flipped it wrong side out.

She's Back
Mama Mallard has come back this year to nest in the same place in the hosta bed on the north side of the house. She's made herself comfortable among last year's leaves.

Doesn't she look all cosy and camouflaged?  She is very unflappable, that girl.  I did rake the bed out around her this weekend and she didn't budge, just kept a beady eye on me.  I talked to her in soft tones as I raked, not that she really cared.

She's kind of gimpy this year.  I think whatever attacked her eggs last year may have gotten her as well.  She was seen limping around the yard with the drake on her heels before she got on the nest and parked it.  Once the hen starts sitting, she shoos the drake away.  He flies off elsewhere to strut, preen, drink his fill of pond scum, and chase more tail.  At least that's my assumption.  What happens in Duck Vegas stays in Duck Vegas.

Conspiracy Theory
Three strikes and I'm out of underwear.  Let me explain.

I needed new undies, so I headed to Kohl's to buy the brand/style I like.  Wouldn't you know, they didn't have the same ones anymore.  So I bought something similar, same size.  Let's call that size X, where X represents a digit I will not disclose.  Sure, I'll talk publicly about my underwear, but the numeric value assigned to said underwear shall not be named.  Boundaries, y'all.

I have worn X for years.  I've worn X when I weighed less and I've worn X when I weighed more.  X was/is my size.  Theoretically.

When I got home with X size undies, I tried them on, as you do.  They were too tight.  Okay, maybe this style ran smaller.  Strike one.

Went to Penney's and bought a Warner's brand, very comfy looking, similar style, seemingly all the right ingredients to a good pair of knickers.  Make that three pair, because there was a buy two get one free deal.  Swiped my card, took them home, tried them on.  Strike two.

A couple weeks pass, allowing time for my frustration level to decrease, and this time I'm at Walmart looking at the display of drawers.  So pretty.  So inexpensive, comparatively speaking.  And what's this?  "The Best Fitting Panty in the World."  Size X.  Sold!

You guessed it:  Strike three.

I am convinced the Universe has conspired to have me face facts:  Thy bum is bigger.  No longer X but [insert audible gasp] Y, where Y is that size that careens dangerously down the granny panty aisle.

Darn you, Universe.  I bet you go commando.

New Start

I'm not so much in a finishing mood lately, it would appear.  Rather I seem to be nudging each project along bit by bit.  Kicking the can down the road with a top here, a backing there, a couple of quilts basted.  Things will all come together in the end, but right now it's kind of like herding turtles.

Now I've started piecing a Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt.  I had a little help with that this weekend when my daughter came to visit.

She got acquainted with Brother Everett by sewing a few blocks. 

She had the idea to group by colors on the design wall, which wasn't something that had occurred to me.

Today I made a few more blocks and shifted some of the blocks on the design wall, alternating them.  It's a subtle change while still keeping the flow by color. 

(Oops, I have one turned wrong on the lower right side.)

So we'll see how things continue to go, but I'm liking it so far!

Tonight I'll be rooting for Wisconsin in the NCAA championship game against Duke.  Go Badgers!

And speaking of the Badger State, I am enjoying the music of a new band from Milwaukee, Vinyl Theatre.

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!