Design Wall Monday--More Scrappy Play

 Design Wall Monday at Judy's Small Quilts and Doll Quilts--lots of great stitching happening there. 

After a recent whole house carpet cleaning, I reassembled the sewing room and spent some time rearranging and trying to put things out of sight--a difficult task when I have no closet and only one usable wall in the open family room I sew in.  True to form, things exploded almost immediately after that attempt!  I don't remember what prompted the dive into the box of leftover blocks and unfinished smalls, but suddenly I was pulling borders for pumpkin blocks made a year ago, to make into pillow covers. The blocks are about 12".

Younger daughter claimed this pumpkin and I laid out some backing options.  Erica chose the stripe. I added narrow border strips of the same brown fabric as the churndash, to preserve the points as the cover bends around the pillow, not shown in this pic. 

The other pumpkin in a churndash got a wider border of my favorite caramel dot.  It is hard to find this color even in fall, sadly.  Channel quilting just using the edge of the walking foot for spacing. The pillow back has been made and I cut binding from a reddish orange stripe print.  I love decorating for Fall. 

Two more wool applique blocks got their finished.  I had to be really careful on the bottom one when trimming the block to 8.5", as I had not centered it well at all on the background. All of the wool blocks for this BOM will have corner triangles added.  I dug through the project box to see how many I had set aside when they were cut years ago!

These are 2.5" squares in stacks of four and I will get a whole bunch of bonus HSTs when I sew them on the corners.  I cut more than the required 80 so I will have more choices.  I'm thinking I will need to lay out all the blocks, both pieced and wool, to avoid duplicate fabrics touching. But I won't drive myself crazy trying to be perfect about it!

Design Wall Monday--10/19/2020 Vacay and Applique

Design Wall Monday is here again.  See more Design Walls on Judy's Small Quilts and Doll Quilts blog. 

We had a nice getaway for a few days to Del Mar.  Leaving midweek is so much better for getting through L.A. traffic, and we took full advantage of the HOV Diamond Lane for many many miles of the 170 mile trip--less than three hours from our house to the hotel, yay! 

It was lovely to sit on the beach below the bluffs one afternoon and watch the many surfers, kids playing, and families enjoying the day.  The fog was hanging off the coast when we arrived...

..but rolled in pretty thick after an hour or so.  It wasn't cold or windy so we stayed as long as we liked.

 

 

Nothing like Vitamin Sea to reset the stress level :)  These were the first vacation days Grant has taken from work all year and he really needed them.

I waded along the shoreline and looked at shells and rocks.  Lucky find of an intact sand dollar--about 2" in diameter, and many impossibly tiny shells. 

I took the Greenpiece BOM wool applique blocks for evening stitching time, which mostly occurred while the World Series played.  Yay Dodgers!

The apple got its seeds and the coneflower is lacking only the stitching on the leaves.  I spent a good amount of time prepping more blocks once we were home, including that bottom block with the thinnest stem ever.

I'm so glad Efficient Me labeled all the freezer paper templates and the wools with colors and numbers all those years ago!  I used up some more scraps for the tiny pieces, and even for some of the larger ones--just eked out the acorn cap from a black scrap. 

A few dots of Elmer's glue stuck them to the background.  Yesterday I also rechecked the final setting instructions for this old BOM, as I knew the blocks needed to be trimmed. 

I used Washi tape to make a "preview" window for centering.  It is very exciting to be getting these blocks to completion after all these years.  The wool blocks get corner triangles before they are set with the pieced blocks that I completed long ago.  There is a center appliqued tree and leaves yet to do as well, but I did make the pieced borders some time ago.  Maybe by the end of the year I'll have a finished top?  No matter, its waited all this time for completion, no rush necessary to the end!

Design Wall Monday--10/12/2020

 Design Wall Monday--see more design walls on Judy's Small Quilts and Doll Quilts blog.  

The 50 Shades of Brown quiltalong by Lori of Humble Quilts had the final clue release for the borders  last week.  I wanted to use up more CW scraps and dug around in my bins for pieces that added the colors and quirkiness of the original antique Lori copied.  

This Judy Rothermel fabric has been in the stash a long time!  It felt good to give a strip to the 50 shades little quilt. 

The other border pieces were also pulled from the scraps.  I chose the single corner square fabric to highlight the pink in the center.  This was a quick and fun quiltalong--my outer borders are 2.5" wide.  It is not quilted yet but I'm considering doing some big stitch quilting with perle cotton.  

Still playing in the scraps, I got all the blocks for the Plaid-ish quilt laid out and moved around (free pattern and tutorial on Kitchen Table Quilting).  There was more switcheroo as I sewed the rows; my brilliant plan for pressing for nesting seams didn't quite work out, mostly due to the "medium" blocks being turned in every other row per the pattern layout. 

The quilt is so scrappy that it didn't really matter much, as long as I could space out the fabric repeats enough.

I completely assembled the top half of the quilt; the bottom four rows await final joining.  What a fun method for scrap play.  Erica of Kitchen Table Quilting has made a second version of the free Plaid-ish quilt I'd love to make too!  

My "to be quilted" projects are really piling up.  I have one out to the quilter (Twilight Hopscotch by Kim Diehl) and keep watching for pics of it on their feed (Quilting by David).  Hopefully it will make it to the top of the list soon--tracking shows it arrived in MO on 9/17.   It's a short work week for me as I'm taking a couple of vacation days.  Unfortunately my husband decided to schedule a carpet cleaning so that means I have to disassemble large portions of the family room I use as my sewing room to reveal the floor.  I'll definitely get a lot of steps on the FitBit that day!

Design Wall Monday--10/5/2020

 It's the first Design Wall Monday of October.  See more Design Walls on Judy's Small Quilts and Doll Quilts blog. 

Hard to believe we are rounding the turn to the holiday season. I've continued to play with scraps and got all the Plaidish blocks completed over the weekend.  What a fun exercise it was. Luckily my pressing plan seems to have worked out with the final set of "medium" blocks so everything will nest as the blocks are arranged. The Plaidish quilt is a free tutorial/pattern from Kitchen Table Quilting, here.

You can see my color piles at the bottom of the photo.  The final block has both light and dark sashing pieces and that is what really makes the plaid appear in the quilt.  

The green calico print in this block used to be on the walls of our girls' room decades ago.  It still pops up from the scrap bins now and then!  I bought many yards of it to line the top half of their walls, using cornstarch wallpaste I made myself. 

Stacks of all three blocks ready for layout.  Looking forward to a lot of bending and switching of blocks for placement, I will try not to overthink it as there are many repeats of colors and fabrics. 

We had a socially distanced visit with our new grandson's other grandparents over the weekend.  It was very very foggy down near the ocean where they live, but with the patio heaters overhead, we were warm and toasty. 

Papa was eye to eye with Dane while his parents were caught in the reflection on the window.  So sweet to see them often!