Rainbow scrap challenge

This year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC), I'm trying some different blocks. First up are crumbs or slabs. Anything goes with these, just stitch similarly sized pieces together and trim to a nice, neat final square. Very satisfying! I had a LOT of little pieces of red for January, and ended up with nine 8.5" square crumb blocks. This is really mindless sewing and great to use as leaders/enders. I have a few chunks of yellow pieced together for Febuary, too.

 

These blocks are a pretty simple rail fence variety. Three strips cut at 2.5" x 8.5" and two at 1.5" x 8.5". For RSC, I decided to cut the larger strips in the monthly color, with the skinny accent strips in the adjacent hue on the color wheel. So for yellow, some blocks have orange accents, and some have yellow-green accents.

Here are the red blocks from January, with purple or orange accents. I'm hoping that the resulting quilt will have a really nice transition from color to color. So far it's really striking to me how those accent strips really change the look of the blocks. And it really burns through my stash of strings!

For my more elaborate RSC block, I've decided to do Bonnie Hunter's Scrap Crystals. The background will be dark blue for each block, and the star points will be the monthly color. The star centers will be one third of the way around the color wheel. So for yellow, blue is the center color. Light blue allows some contract with the background.

Here is the red star points block, with yellow as the center color. I'll end up cutting from two colors each month instead of just the one RSC color, but that's OK.

I'm glad that yellow was chosen for February because I already had my yellow scraps pulled out. The block lotto for the Sunshine Online Guild calls for blue and yellow block in January. I had a few orphans lingering from other projects and was able to add borders to bring them all up to 12.5". These are leftover blocks from two different mystery QALs.

In other scrap news, I received this super fun stack of fabric from Cynthia of Quilting is More Fun Than Housework. It's all fish and fishing themed: trout, fishing poles and hats, water, etc. She was ready to pass it along to someone in exchange for some aqua scraps, so it worked out nicely for both of us. I have a small collection of other angling fabrics, and I'll use them to make a wheelchair quilt or two. Thanks, Cynthia!

The Blue and the Gray

I have a finish to share today. This lap quilt is a gift for my Dad. I asked him what his favorite colors are, and he said blue and gray. We then talked about his love of history and his knowledge of the Civil War. 

I kept thinking about Ulysses S. Grant as I was stitching the blue and gray fabrics. Did he nap? Surely he must have, and possibly under a quilt in his favorite colors? Naming this one Ulysses' Nap Blankie seemed just a tad undignified, so I settled on General Grant Takes A Nap instead. 

The pattern is called "Buttercream Twist," and is available for free here. All the small accent squares are a fun fabric with math and chemistry scribbles on it. The contrast was great on the scrappy blue fabrics, but a few of the grays were more subtle. I couldn't resist using this neat world map fabric with silver metallic accents, though.

My favorite block is this one with the dragonflies and other insects on it. The quilting is simple wavy lines that alternate direction in each block. Lots of texture without too many hours under the needle.

I had a couple of extra blocks, so I put the ones with the least amount of contrast on the back with a chunk of fabric that has bamboo leaves on it. The quilt ended up about 50"x70" which is a good size for a quick snooze. I'm happy to say that Dad really likes it, and I think Ulysses might have, too.

Fireburst, Fundy and Strings

My final three finishes for 2018 are ready for their big reveal. The first is my Fireburst quilt, made during Tish's quilt along. 

Tish published clear, step by step instructions each month to make a quilt in one of two sizes. I chose the baby size, with a final block size of 32" x 32". I added a simple border to bring it up to 37" square.

It was really fun to watch my piles of navy, baby blue, and orange morph into this bursting star design!  So cool.

I used some wool batting scraps and a pieced backing, and quilted it up with floppy feathers. The result is a super light, but fat and poofy quilt.

I'll be donating this to Little Lambs, which is located in Utah and serves childen in the foster care system. I figure the wool will make it nice and warm for a small person who could use a quilty hug.

The second piece was made using the Fundy Skies pattern by Cannuck Quilter. Joanne asked me to be a pattern tester for the baby size, which is a single block. I pulled out some red, navy, gold and gray fabrics to play with. 

The pattern was really easy to follow, and I love this on-point square shape! However, the fabrics I chose didn't feel very baby-ish.  Hm, what to do? I had some small panel blocks in a lighthouse theme, so I added those to the top and bottom of the Fundy block to make the quilt a rectangle.

Fundy Lighthouses finishes at about 36" x 50", which is a great wheelchair quilt size. The narrow width keeps the quilt from getting caught in the wheels, but it is still long enough to warmly cover an adult's lap. I used the rest of more wool batting to keep is light and cozy, and quilted it with a medium stipple using variegated blue and white thread. 

The thread is really pretty on the spool, but I feel there was too much contrast between the darkest and lightest parts of the variegation. In the future I'll look for more subtle shading for that type of thread. 

With the nautical lighthouses and the patriotic colors, perhaps this quilt will appeal to a Navy vet.  I'll send it to my friend Doris, and her guild in Alabama will pass it along to a nursing home.

And here's the final finish for 2018. I've been making string blocks each month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I love them! It's so satisfying to turn a jumbled pile of miscellaneous strings into neat, tidy blocks. 

However, I used fabric foundations for the stitching, so the blocks turned out double thickness and quite heavy. Rather than make a complete, but heavy quilt, I decided to donate this 50" x 70" top to Victoria's Quilts. They will quilt it up with a warm flannel backing and give it to a person in Canada who is living with cancer. I figured it's cold enough up in the neighborly north for a super heavy quilt to be useful.

And here is an early glimpse into some things I've been playing with lately. I bought a mini Quick Curve Ruler to try some new curvy blocks. Isn't this a fun shape? It's supposed to be a Christmas ornament, but I used a charm pack of pretty metallic pastels and has a different feel. Sort of Moorish.

I also delved into my neutrals and brights string scraps and made some rectangular blocks using paper foundations. I don't want to end up with another set of double thick, heavy string blocks with fabric foundations. I really like  the wonky diamond shapes but the paper bits are annoying.  I was tickled to read that Diann of Little Penguin Quilts is also making rectangular/diamond string blocks, and hers look so great in red and cream. So interesting how an idea like this seems to pop up in multiple places at once!

Christmas 2018 finishes

Happy New Year! Everyone still has all their Christmas decorations up, right? Good, because I'm sharing my holiday finishes today.

For the first time in many years, we got on an airplane during the dreaded winter holiday travel season. But the reward for enduring crowded flights filled with sneezing travelers was getting to visit family and friends. I decided to make zipper pouches to give to the folks we were visiting. Nothing big, just small tokens of affection. It was fun to select fabric for each person and quilt up the bags. Sewing with zippers is definitely not my favorite thing, but I feel like I'm getting the hang of it now.

I added a few little suprises inside the bags. This one for my Dad has beer fabrics peeking through the zipper.

This horse bag was given to my Mom, and has music notes inside. She and her husband both sing in choirs, so I put the same fun fabric inside his gift.

A dear friend lost her beautiful tuxedo kitty a few months ago, so I made her a bag with holiday kitties to cheer her up. The little paw prints inside honor the prints our pets leave forever on our hearts.

And speaking of cats, I made this little holiday wall hanging for above our bed. It uses six panels of Debbie Hron fabric. 

The little contented Christmas cats have such sweet faces! The central square is all part of the panel, and I added borders to make a star shape.

My husband really likes this paisley print, so I used up all my scraps of it. The quilting is simple stipples in the borders, SITD around the stars and squares, and outlining of each cat.

The reason I needed a new wall hanging is because this is the first year we've had a Christmas quilt on our bed! Sorry for all the dark photos, but our bedroom is incredibly dark. Our windows are only 8"x18" and the walls are dark wood. Great for sleeping, but lousy for quilt photos.

The wall above the bed usually holds my Postcards from Ikea piece, which is rainbow bright. It didn't look right with Christmas red and green, so Contented Christmas Cats chased a squirrel (or maybe vice versa?) and a more coordinated look was born.

The bed quilt was actually finished months ago during Christmas in July, and put away until December. The flimsy dates back a whole year. I quilted the scrappy cream background with big feathers, and the darker red and green areas with a stipple.

The binding is a black and white stripe, and the quilting in the red border is simple straight lines. After all those feathers, I was kinda done with the quilting to be honest. I should probably do borders first before I run out of steam.

 

The back is solid green fleece, and I used no batting in this piece. We are usually somewhere warm for the winter, so this weight is just right for us.

The fleece shows the shape of quilting really, really well. But it completely hides the individual stitches. The bobbin thread is off white, and you can't see any white at all on the back! Gotta love that thick, forgiving fleece. 

When we return to the boat this week, it will be time to pack up and put away our Christmas decor until next year. Meanwhile, we're enjoying everyone else's holiday lights and trees. I hope you all had a wonderful season. Onward to 2019!

Caged Samurai

I'm a bit behind in posting some of my final finishes for 2018. We're currently traveling away from the boat, helping again with family medical issues and fitting in a few visits with friends here and there. Today I have a little free time to blog and show you Caged Samurai, a finish from late November/early December.

This UFO was pieced over the course of many months. The central panel is an odd, almost tattoo-like graphic fabric. It was part of some big batch of scraps that I bought on eBay several years ago. The warrior wields a sword and strikes a fierce pose! I immediately knew I wanted to set him behind thin strips, as if being seen through vertical bars. The purple bars and frame were stitched on, and then he sat for a long time. What do you do with this kind of piece? It certainly wasn't meant to be a charity quilt for a toddler!

At some other point, I was playing with some Asian-inspired fabric scraps and used Anita Grossman Solomon's technique to make square-in-a-squares. The little squares piled up, then ended up in a baggie in a drawer. Then some other scraps got stitched together into long columns of coins, and ended up in a different baggie.

One day, all those parts told me they would probably work together, with a little help. I added the panels of fabric on the left and right of Mr. Samurai to improve the proportions and stitched on the Anita squares. That seemed a bit dark, so I added a frame and border of bright white to contain the coin strips. Getting closer to just right!

He then waited quietly on a hanger as a UFO for quite a while. One day last month, he told me to use a purple binding as a final frame, and I knew Caged Samurai was ready to be quilted. After a bit of stitch in the ditch to stabilize and define the different areas, I enjoyed playing with several different motifs.

In the coins, I quilted easy wishbones. In the squares, I did a simple dot-to-dot design in the outer triangles, and a curvy orange peel inside the squares. I was inspired by Vicki's use of the latter motif, and used her technique of chanting "fat skinny fat skinny" to keep track of which way to curve next!

The side panels are too busy to see any quilting, so I cheated with stippling using dark purple thread. I think. I couldn't see a dang thing as I stitched, so I might have drawn the Mona Lisa in there for all I know.



Inside the "cage," I used this serpentine design just to add texture without obscuring the face. The bronze colored thread looks just right in here among all the metallic gold accents.



In the white column next to the Anita squares, I mimicked the shape with more dot-to-dot stitching. It's a little wonky, but I'm OK with that.



The outer borders required just a little marking. The motif is sinusoidal waves filled with serpentine echoing, which takes longer to type than it does to stitch!



I marked the curves lightly to make sure that they ended the way I wanted in the corners.



The transition around the corner from the thin side borders to the wider top and bottom borders took a little head scratching, but I'm happy with how it turned out. White thread on white fabric, plus a trip through the washer and dryer to crinkle up, hides a multitude of "creative" stitches.



The backing is this gray quasi-Asian newspaper fabric, plus chunks of other Asian inspired fabrics. I call it "quasi" because there seems to be nothing readable among all those characters. I have an app on my phone that can look at images and pick out words and numbers in any language, but it found nothing but a few numbers in this. So it seems to be just scribbles, which I suppose is better than rude words. The big advantage of this backing is it hides EVERYTHING. Highly recommended for trying new quilting motifs!

Many of these metallic fabrics were quite stiff, and I worried that the quilt would be uncomfortable. But it washed beautifully and became wonderfully drapey. In spite of his fierce appearance, Caged Samurai is quite a softy.

A few days after I finished the quilt, I learned that a friend was really struggling to recover from a car accident. Charles is a quirky, irreverent, funny guy and I knew immediately that Caged Samurai had found his forever home. I am happy to report that Charles loves this piece and tells me that not only has he always adored homemade quilts, but purple is his favorite color! I hope it brings him comfort and healing.

Linking up with Tish's UFO Busting party.

2018 Year in Review

Welcome to my look back at 2018! If you're seeing this at the end of 2019, my apologies. I carefully put together all the photo collages a year ago but never actually published them on my blog. So I've back-dated this post to December 31, 2018, but am actually writing it on December 31, 2019. Which means it will probably be sent to subscribers on January 1, 2020. Confused? Me, too! In any case, these are old quilts that you've probably seen before, so feel free to skip this post. These summaries are mostly for myself in any case.

Starting from the beginning of the year, I made several gift quilts, some pillow covers, and several small donation quilts for Jack's Basket.

This batch is three tiny doll quilts for A Doll Like Me, a couple wall hangings for the boat, and two for other charities.

Three flimsies for Victoria's Quilts, donated as part of Hands2Help 2018. More pillow covers for us. The rest were donated to Little Lambs, Wrap-A-Smile, and Covered in Love.

A few more charity quilts. I really like that top design and should make another one of those! The Old Italian blocks, on the other hand, were fiddly enough that one quilt of those is sufficient. Too many other blocks to try to repeat ones that I didn't really like making.

I spy with my little eye one gift, one for our guest bed, three charities using panels, and at least four I-Spy quilts! 

A few more gifts, two more tiny doll quilts, two quilt along finishes, and miscellaneous charity donations. They all look like they are the same size because the way the photos are cropped, but they certainly are not!

A mystery QAL, two holiday pieces for the boat, an RSC finish. I was a pattern tester for the bottom right piece. Such a cool design!

Since I wrote this post after writing my 2019 summary, its interesting to see how my focus changed between the two years. I don't think I made any doll quilts in 2019. I also didn't participate in as many quilt alongs. And clearly we have enough quilts on board now after making quite a few to keep in 2018. If you made it all the way to the bottom of this post, thanks for sticking around. Happy New Year!