Troubles with Blogger

I learned today that there is some sort of problem with comments on Blogger blogs, including mine. Normally, when you leave a comment here, I get an email. That email has your address on it, and your comment is the message. It's a simple matter for me to hit "reply" and continue the conversation.

I love that! Getting your kind, funny, inquisitive, supportive comments make the work of blogging completely worthwhile to me. I try to reply to each and every one of them unless you are a no-reply commenter.

However, that system seem to be broken right now. In order to see your comments, I must go to a special comment moderation page, click through to your Blogger/Google profile to get your email address, copy that, open my email, and start an email from scratch. I can't even cut and paste your comment, which is super frustrating!

I really hope that Blogger fixes this soon soon soon, because I have no idea how to fix it from here. If you have your own Blogger blog, you might want to double check that you are getting comments correctly. I know most of the QBS (Quilt Blogo-Sphere) is eager to recognize and encourage commenting to keep our community connected and vibrant.

The photo on this post is a ziplock full of my dark background strip scraps. I've set these aside to mail to Janice at Color, Creating and Quilting, who needs them for a new project. I'm happy to help her out, because that's just the sort of fun interaction I love so much about our little online world. Meanwhile, I'll try to keep up with your comments using the slow, frustrating method. Thanks for your patience!

In the UFO trenches

My quilting process tends to go roughly like this: Be inspired either by a pattern or a fabric, and sew up a top until it feels finished. If it's a gift for a particular person, I usually launch right into quilting and get 'er done. But "feels finished" could also mean "until I run out of fabric" or "until I run out of motivation." If I don't have a recipient in mind, pieces like that can often end up as UFOs, because the final size is undetermined. Is it big enough yet?

Different charities request different size quilts. Some have a minimum and maximum range, and others are pretty strict about wanting a specific size. And of course I try to match the top to the ages and circumstances of the recipients of that particular charity. So until I've chosen the charity, a top can float around in limbo for a while.

Last week I was motivated to go through most of my UFOs and choose a final home for them. That allowed me to add borders until they were the right size, and then make backings for them. Adding long strips for borders and wrangling the large chunks of fabric for backings is a whole different mindset than piecing small blocks, and I need to be in the right mood. That mood can be fleeting, so when it arrived, I seized it. Carpe diem and all that.

I had the idea that I would take photos of each top and each backing to share with you. Frankly, the photos were atrocious. It's so windy here that even INSIDE the boat things were flapping around mightily. And most of these flimsies have already been shared here on the old blog-o-roonie. So classy pics of piles of folded fabric will have to serve.

First up is the fun fish top I made with fabric that Karen sent me. It needed another border to get it up to the right size for Wrap a Smile (WAS.) I added a watery blue print and kept the directionality so the water flows side to side and not up and down. The yellow and blue plaid was plenty wide for a backing and didn't need piecing, so easy peasy. I'll use that zesty stripe for binding.

I've started labeling tops with their rough size and potential recipient, using blue painters tape. I do this with batting scraps, too, and it's so helpful to not have to measure the same piece over and over again. 

Huh. I just realized that I didn't ever share this flimsy, so this one will have to be a surprise after it's quilted up. It is rail fence blocks with those brightly colored running horses in the center of each one. I added a couple of black and purple borders thinking it might appeal to an older child at WAS. The purple fabric with the scallops on it will serve as both backing and binding. It's a vintage print and at 45" wide, didn't need to be pieced. That's a little tight for a 44" wide top, but I'm willing to trim off any small "oops" spots if the backing shifts. There's certainly plenty of black border to spare.

This is the Ernie quilt pattern top with an added border to bring it up to size for Covered in Love (CIL.) The backing is pieced from the last bit of the floral border, and two of the stripe fabrics, salmon and green. The binding will be the solid purple. All four of those fabrics were donated to Covered in Love, and Kat shared them with me. It feels good to use them together in this quilt.

This is the top made of Asian-inspired fabrics that I shared last week. All the sashing pieces are scrappy whites and creams, so I made the 5" wide border scrappy, too. The corner that shows here looks a little dark, but the overall border blends nicely. For the back, I pieced large patchwork squares of my darker tan and taupe fabrics. They don't really go well with the bright kid's fabrics I like to use, so I'm happy they work with this piece. (Note to self: stop buying drab fabric.) The binding will be the tan and black geometric. This one is tentatively headed to CIL, or I might keep it for a while. It's nice to have a few pieces finished that I can give to friends or family members who need a fast, quilty hug.

I made the main part of this over a year ago, intending to donate it to a charity in Charleston that wanted small 36" x 48" wheelchair quilts. I didn't get it finished before we left Charleston, so it lurked as a UFO. The block pattern is called Old Italian. This week I added the black stop border and the wide dusty blue outer border. The latter was also a donation to CIL, so this piece will soon circle back to Kat's charity. I pieced the backing out a similar dusty blue in my stash, plus a burgundy/blue/white/gold stripe. The mottled burgundy should make a good binding. It has tiny metallic flecks in it. Fancy! Oh, and the blue border fabric was originally 108" wide. Man, that makes it easy to cut borders.

 

This piece never made it onto the blog when it was originally pieced. I have no idea why, because I really like it. It's made of orphan blocks from various projects, sashed in purple and set into a white with little purple flowers background. I really enjoyed the mental math required to get them all "floating" like that. It was actually a little too big for Quilts Beyond Borders (QBB), so I trimmed off an inch from the total width.

QBB requires a label on their quilts, so I've been avoiding finishing any pieces for them. Isn't that pathetic? That's how much I hate making these kinds of labels. I unearthed my last piece of machine printable fabric recently, so I grit my teeth and used it to make a few labels in the requested format. This one is stitched onto the backing, which is a single piece of mottled green. The aqua stripe will be the binding.

Six quilts with backings, ready to be basted and quilted. I'll share photos taken in better lighting as each one blossoms into a finished quilt. We'll be out of the Bahamas by then, so I won't have to deal with the relentless wind.

Hands2Help 2018 Summary

This year's Hands2Help Charity Challenge is coming to an end this week, and it's time to link up our finishes to share with other helpers. As usual, Sarah did a fantastic job finding worthy charities and rustling up some great sponsors. If you've been following my blog, you've probably seen all these before.

This year she chose three different charities, and I sewed something for each one. The first is an old favorite, Quilty Hugs for Happy Chemo. This charity, run by Emily of Em's Scrap Bag, provides quilts for folks undergoing chemotherapy. I donated Key West Chickens. I mailed it off back in March while we were still in Florida so at least this one made the H2H deadline.

The second charity, Victoria's Quilts Canada, provides quilts to people living with cancer in Canada. They asked Hands2Help participants to provide quilt tops only, 50" x 70" in size. The tops will be quilted locally with cozy flannel backings to provide extra warmth in the Great White North. Since quilt tops are lighter, easier to ship, and faster to sew than finished quilts, I made three. The first one shown above is The UPS Quilt, made with brown and black string scraps. 

Double Four Patch was made from a variety of scraps and ended up being one of my favorite pieces.

Autumn Orphans was pieced with left over blocks and some cute panel pieces. These three tops are sitting on Sean's dresser, carefully packed away in a plastic bag, waiting to be shipped up to Victoria's after we return to the US.

The third charity is called Little Lambs Foundation for Kids. They provide backpack "comfort kits" to children of all ages who are transitioning into foster care, emergency shelter or who have been hospitalized. I chose to make "blankies" without batting to fit more easily into the backpacks, and sized them for kids aged 5 or younger. This one is called Through the Reef and has corduroy backing.

Streak of Lightning has flannel backing in a sweet blue giraffe print.

And Pink Giraffes is the same flannel in a different colorway, backed with a coordinating cotton pique. All three have satin baby blanket binding. They are also waiting to be shipped once we are out of the Bahamas. I'll miss the H2H deadline, but I know that each of these charities' work is ongoing and donations are always welcome.

Thank you again, Sarah, for the opportunity to let my hands help!

Scrippity scrappity

Pink is the color o' the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I've finished my three RSC projects for May. Even though I don't particularly like pink, and don't sew with it very much, I still had plenty of pink scraps to choose from. How does that happen? My four pink string blocks are above.

Next are my two pink spiral blocks from the book Cozy Modern Quilts by Kim Schaefer. The pattern is "Maze Madness" and there are blocks with the accent color on the outside of the block and ones with the neutral on the outside. (This book was my first exposure to modern quilting and I fell in love. Not that it's the best book, but just the idea of bold color and geometric design in quilts? Yes, please!)

My clowder of lurid cats has grown by two. I use the RSC color in the background and the color wheel opposite for the cats. The green cat of cat fabrics is very meta.

My muse: grey cat on blue background.

Most of these little projects were completed just before we had a guest aboard this week. I knew I would be dismantling my studio to turn it back into the guest stateroom, so I didn't want to tackle anything large. Much as I hate to stop sewing, it's a good exercise to completely clean up the creative mess a couple of times a year.

I unearthed a bag of Asian-inspired scraps during the process, and decided to stitch up these simple blocks. Just a rectangle with two scrappy neutral strips on opposite edges.

When set with the blocks alternating, a basket weave design emerges. This is a modification of a free pattern called Colorworks, which calls for 4.5" x 6.5" rectangles. I had lots of 6" scraps, so I cut my pieces 4" x 6" instead. I'll add a scrappy neutral border to it at some point which will complete those dangling edge blocks.

I also found my bag of non-quilting cotton scraps: flannels, piques, and corduroys. I don't have room to collect a real stash of these fabrics, so I've decided not to buy any more of them and am trying to just use them up. 

The last bits and bobs in the bag got cut into strings and stitched up into QAYG blocks directly onto batting scraps. There was just enough for two pillow shams, and they were finished in time for our guest to use them. Score!

For the pillow backs, I used more of my decorator-weight blue dinosaur fabric. The pattern almost matches in the middle. Our guest, who has two young children at home, commented that she liked how the pillows have a kid side and an adult side. (And yes, she very much enjoyed her short tropical vacation away from her kids. Her husband is a pilot so she can fly for free, and having friends who just happened to be on their boat in the Turks and Caicos worked out very nicely!)

And finally, I pulled and cut up my fabrics for Tish's Fire Burst mystery QAL. I'm making the 32"x32" baby size and have enough of the navy blue left over to perhaps add a few borders. That blue and white fabric is covered with sweet line drawings of little birds.

The flannel and Asian scraps are all used up, the pink scrap bag shrank a tiny bit, and the QAL pieces fit nicely in a new bag. We enjoyed having our lovely guest aboard for three days and now I'm setting the studio up again. Life is good!