February Table Scraps Challenge - Two Table Toppers

Oh my, how this past month has felt like a slog.  Funny how the shortest month of the year can feel so long, not to mention repetitive, a la Groundhog Day.  I tried to stay engaged, but my attention span was hit and miss.  Needless to say, not a lot got done in the sewing department.  And with a long stretch of below zero days, the thought of hanging out in the cold basement didn't have much appeal.  Instead I did some genealogy on the computer, filed and shredded a couple long-ignored piles of paperwork, and prepared and filed my income taxes (yay!).  So there was productivity of a different sort, albeit with a huge side of Netflix.

Thankfully, it's been above freezing for several days now, so we're going on Day Four of getting back into daily walks outside around the neighborhood.  Whew, it feels good to stretch my legs and feel the sun on my face again!  What does NOT feel so good is how TIGHT my pants are after a few months (okay, most of 2020) spent baking treats and indulging my chocolate cravings on a too-regular basis.  Ugh.  I literally sausaged myself into a pair of cords to go walk outside the other day, and when a Kleenex dropped out of my coat pocket, I could not bend over to pick it up!  So, obviously, the time has come to switch back into more healthy eating mode, and move my butt more, in hopes of having clothes to wear once spring finally gets here.

Can you relate?

On to the Table Scraps Challenge.  Having procrastinated until this week to make something for it, I started by looking through a plastic drawer full of vintage fabrics.  Must've had old stuff on the brain from the genealogy work.  Anyway, I started sorting the old fabrics into coordinating color piles.  One thing led to another, and I started making some string blocks inspired by a tutorial I'd seen HERE by Amy Smart.

You only need to make four 8-1/2 inch blocks for this mini, because you then cut the larger blocks to make four smaller blocks from each, or a total of 16 squares.  Then you just rearrange them to your liking and sew them together to make a mini-quilt.  Mine measured 15-1/2 inches square when done.

I backed it with a larger piece of the pink and green feed sack fabric with pineapples.  I'd found this feed sack at a thrift store a few years ago, and it still was stitched together as a sack until a few days ago when I took it apart.  There were even a few bits of some kind of grain or chaff in the inside corner of it, even though I'd washed it when I brought it home initially.  I'm guessing this particular fabric is at least 50 years old, but in excellent shape.

I did crosshatch quilting to mirror the graphics of the pineapples in that funky print.  I don't know why, but I get a Sponge Bob Square Pants vibe from this print, even though it predates the cartoon by  decades.

This mini quilt project was a good way to get my sewing mojo working again.  Easy on the brain piecing, quirky fabrics, and small enough to finish quickly for a hit of good vibes for having accomplished something.

A day or two later I repeated the process and made another one, this time working with some blue vintage fabrics, including two other feed sacks.  One with blue and purple dots, and the other with blue and green flowers. 

I also used that blue and green fabric for the back.  Swirly quilting on this one.  I tried quilting daisies on my test run, but my free-motion skills were rusty and a bit too inconsistent for flowers.  So swirls it was.  

It felt like this sweet blue 1970 Panasonic radio—the Panapet, as it was called—needed to be in the photo shoot.  I had one like this back in the day, but it's long gone.  This is one I picked up at an antique store a few years ago.  It still works!

Linking to The Joyful Quilter's Table Scraps Challenge.

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.

Many Things Monday

Brother Everett and I have been kicking the can further on up the road, metaphorically speaking, moving incrementally forward on a few different things.  Namely, a couple of backings for two quilt flimsies which have been on the design wall for a long enough time.

Here is a peek at the backing for the Tea Towel Challenge 2014 quilt.

The next step on the Tea Towel Challenge quilt is to machine applique around the fused feather/leaf shapes.  Now that I've gotten a little more comfortable with the new machine, I'm ready to get started on that job.

The backing for the improv quilt (above) is from a vintage fabric found at the thrift store sometime in the last six months.  Since it was only 30-some inches wide, I needed to sew two lengths of it together to make it wide enough.  

The next step on that quilt will be to machine quilt in the ditch, and then I may add some hand quilting in perle (pearl?) cotton.  I've never done that before, so it'll be a new experience for me.

Sarah is having a 16-patch quilt-along (see link on sidebar).  I've been unsure what kind of quilt I wanted to make with 16 patches, so I've dragged my feet a bit on getting started.  I did find some 2-1/2 inch olive and brown squares in the scrap bin, however, and just for kicks and giggles, I sewed what was left of those onto a variety of brown scraps, ending up with two 16-patches like so.

I love bright colors, but I'm also very compelled by earthy tones like this.  These are orphan blocks for now, but you never know when inspiration will come along and carry them away into another project. 

As I got to looking around the sewing room, I spied the lovely stack of hand-dyed fabric I'd won recently in the Crossing the Drunkard's Path quilt-along from Vicki Welsh.  Aren't they gorgeous?

I started grouping some of the pieces into light/dark (-ish) pairs and, in the process, hit upon an idea for the 16-patch blocks, to be arranged in a 16-patch and X's quilt (a/k/a Good Night Irene).  I just need to decide on the background fabric, but I'm leaning toward a light gray low-volume print in the stash, assuming I've got enough of it or can find more, if necessary.

I decided it was time to change up the office space Pyrex display.  So it went from this fall-like aggregation:

To this:

This seemed especially appropriate as Valentine's Day approaches, but really it's true all year round.  I *heart* Pyrex!

Here is something else I *heart* lately.  This will definitely make your taste buds tingle.

And your lips burn.  That's a good thing, right?

Sew First, Sort Later

On a whim—which is how the best and worst of things usually start, right?—I began sewing 16-patches last weekend.

Before the whim, however, I had been cleaning the sewing space.  All that fabric folding and fondling led to pulling various things from the stash and musing Whatever shall I make with this?  And this?  Or this?

I like my stash, I really do.  It's eclectic, just like my musical taste and my taste in movies.  Part Frank Sinatra, part Band of Skulls; Pride and Prejudice and The Big Lebowski.

Don't you love that crazy vintage print underneath this stack of modern ones?  I mean, what is all that business going on?  Must make something with this lot, I don't know what yet.  The suggestion box is open. I only have a FQ of the pink and the blue-green rectangles, so something small.

Back to the 16-patches, I mashed up a few fabric pairs and this is what I have going so far.

I don't know if I'll end up throwing it all together in one crazy-busy quilt.  I'm just sewing first and figuring things out later.

I gave Kathy, the friend who is having me make the chevron quilts for her grandsons, these two mug rugs or minis, so she can remember her grandson's quilts by.

In other news, our 31-year-old washing machine broke last week.  The washer and dryer had been a wedding gift from my parents.

We'd had both fixed once or twice through the years, a belt here or a heating element there, but they otherwise ran like champs up until the bitter end.  This time the washer went out literally with a bang.  Lots of banging, in fact.  It sounded like a ginormous load unbalanced situation, but when Norm went down to see about it, he found a six-inch metal plate laying inside the washer, having sheared off from somewhere in the inner workings, and all the clothes spattered with some kind of rusty schmutz.  In other words, it wasn't pretty.

So we bought a Speed Queen set and take delivery of it this Wednesday.  I'm stoked!  Speed Queen, that standard of laundromats and college dorms.  It feels kind of old-fashioned, no digital controls, no front loading or steam jets. Just a regular ole agitator and plenty of swishing water action, but I needed another workhorse pair.  They still make Speed Queens with all-metal parts, something I like about my vintage Singer and newer Juki sewing machines as well.  And they're a "Sconnie" company, built right up the road about 40 miles.  Check out this vintage ad from the 1970s. 

(Image Source)

Silver metallic pants and go-go boots!  Groovy baby!

Fan-o-rama

How's that for a silly title?  Well, I'm running on empty at this hour, what can I say.  I should be doing the final round of shoulder exercises before bed, but I just can't anymore tonight.  

Physical therapy wasn't bad on Wednesday, but the two things the therapist added to my existing regimen seem as much aggravating to the shoulder as they may be helpful.  Hoping the soreness will calm down soon.  Anyway, it's been a busy day, and then I had a brewski about an hour ago and that pretty much sapped my will to check anything else off the to-do list.

However, earlier today I finished a quilt top.  Ta-da!

I like how it turned out, all diagonally squiggly and such in this setting.  It's about 60 x 70 (-ish), which makes a nice throw or kid sized quilt.

This project started as a way to use an older fabric my sister had given me.  I used an EZ Dresden ruler to cut the pieces, then switched them up into grandmother's fan type blocks. 

I will not be naming this quilt Fan-o-rama.  Other suggestions are welcome, however.

Linking to:

Progress Report

I'm happy with the progress that has been made on an impromptu quilt that's coming together.  It started with a challenge fabric (back one post) and the notion of incorporating that into a Dresden.

I sewed the pieces together in groups of five, or quarter Dresdens, then played around with them.  I liked the idea of doing diagonal squiggles instead of circles.

That morphed into a decision to transform them into grandmother's fan blocks.  First I had to to reverse engineer them to get the inner quarter circle and outer background piece (trace the curves and add seam allowances).

The little quarter circle turned out to be kind of a bugger to piece.  It became apparent that my usual method (involving pinning and sewing with the U-shaped piece on top) wasn't going to work in this tight space.  I recalled seeing a tutorial last year by someone demonstrating a no-pin method.  I tried that, and it worked well, but you have to sew vewey, vewey swowy (read that part in an Elmer Fudd voice), literally a stitch or two/three at a time, adjusting the layers as you go.  Like so:

Never mind the patina on my vintage machine.  She's got a lot of miles on her.  And a half century ago when she was new, Mom often parked an ashtray right there in the harp space while she sewed.  Miraculously, nothing went up in flames.

After piecing about a dozen or so blocks, I laid what I had out on the floor.  I'll need to trim them down along the white edges so they're a little smaller, since I want the red parts to tuck into the design a little more.

I tried setting them on point, too, just for kicks.  Not bad either.  Another time maybe.

After seeing them laid out, I decided to experiment with a different fabric in the small quarter circle for half of the blocks.  We'll see how that works out.  I've got another twenty-something to make.

I'll be linking up with the fun at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.  Have a great weekend!

Challenge Fabric and Quilting Along

My sister gave me yards of this navy and white print fabric a couple years ago to use as I saw fit.  She had bought it to make a dress (in the '80s, I think), which obviously never happened.  I, too, stashed it away so far back as to be off the radar.

Recently, I found it again and prewashed it.  As it lay on my cutting table waiting to be refolded, I contemplated whatever to do with it.  Perhaps a two-color quilt in flying geese, or maybe stars, or half-square triangles?  But I worried that all by itself, it might make a brand new quilt look instantly dated.  Maybe just use the yardage for a border, or a backing?

It's mostly cotton, from what I can tell.  It may have some poly, judging from how it didn't wrinkle in the dryer and from the feel of it.  But it is a nice weight and seems stable enough to quilt with, is the point.  The selvage says The Manes Corporation, which I believe is no longer in business since a couple decades ago.  I guess that makes it vintage.

Then I thought maybe combining it with other fabrics might be a better idea—you know, sort of losing it in the shuffle.  On a whim, I decided to make a trial Dresden block with it.

And I liked that.  However, maybe I wouldn't do a traditional Dresden but something else, like a diagonal squiggle with quarter blocks.

Still undecided about how to put it together, but I went ahead and cut more pieces, so we'll see how it evolves.  I'll still have loads the navy/white print left.  Any ideas?

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If you follow me on Pinterest, you may have seen this skirt I pinned from JCPenney recently.  I don't wear short (or any) skirts anymore, but I loved the design and thought it'd make a cool quilt.

JCP - $9.99 y'all!

So I experimented with a couple different methods for how to make the blocks, including a drunkard's path (which worked okay, but matching the arcs where a thick seam meets was a challenge).

I also tried a one-seam flying geese block and then folding the sides back, cathedral windows style.

I tossed these in the odd blocks bin for another time.  A couple days later, however, I saw a blurb about an upcoming quit-along hosted by Megan at City Stitches.  Serendipity!

I have downloaded the pattern, which is basically a modified drunkard's path block.  Now I need to get my fabric together.  Check out the post here for some cool variations.

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Here's a tune from the vault, circa 1977, which I found myself singing along with the chorus ("no no no no nooo no no no...") in the car the other day.  Such a pretty song for the saga of a deadbeat (and only slightly remorseful) dad.