Still Playing With Orts

I love Kim Diehl's scrappy style and the great color mix she uses. I found one of her books at Joann's and used a coupon for a great price. 

That's the last of that CW print but there are a lot more to cut up. The cover quilt is first on my list but several more from this book are equally wonderful.  I did some MATH to figure what the minimum length 2.5" strip would be, and 25" is it. 

Speaking of 2.5" strips, that is what I cut my binding strips. I like to have my binding all made and ready to apply before I start quilting. 

I can't tell you how many times I've made the above mistake!  This is NOT  right sides together. Rookie errors are annoying!

Design Wall Monday--March 17, 2014

Happy St. Patrick's Day this DWM!  On my design surface are a number of little projects that are getting follow-through attention. First is the quilt-along top I showed last week, Pink Lemonade.  I picked up this brand new magazine at the grocery store the other day.  While it is a aimed at more modern quilters of the beginner and intermediate type, there are always things to be learned.

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 Lots of great projects and interesting ideas. 

This cute flannel baby quilt design showed a two color binding that made it's own piping and, since I had so little to work with for binding options for the Pink Lemonade, the idea was intriguing.

Here's my two color binding, something I've always wanted to try but never did until now--this simple method is genius:  When the binding is applied to the back of the quilt and brought to the front, the piping of yellow will be created when machine stitched in the ditch between the two colors to complete the binding application.  I'm going to big-stitch hand quilt Pink Lemonade and it is all set in sandwich form for my bus commute.

Another little sandwiched table mat from last week.  This one got machine quilted since the photo and binding is on.  On the actual National/International Quilting Day, my sister and I didn't sew, but we did shop. 

I bored my sister by buying a bunch of bolt ends of neutrals--but I needed them!  This great cheddar print met her approval, however.  It is a Jinny Beyer print.  The other 1.5 yard piece was a good sale price and will get used sometime.  Our LQS was looking mighty barren and I'm worried it will be closing if more folks don't frequent the store.  The owner had a "staying in business sale" that I missed because it was the day my grandson was born, so I definitely wanted to spend some dollars there. Support your local independent stores, folks! 

One final sandwich made for the day.  This poor tablerunner has been waiting at least a year and a half to become a "real quilt".  The binding got made too!

See more Design Walls on Judy's Patchwork Times.

Design Wall Monday--3/10/14

A late posting for DWM, but here goes!  On my design surface are still more CW repro scraps and partially completed objects (PCOs).

 

One of these things is not like the other...one of these things was just made wrong...

This was an experiment in leftover HSTs and a pack of precut squares.  I was not happy with the size of the coping strip I had to cut in order to make the odd size of the squares (4") fit the HSTs I had trimmed to 2.5".  MATH again!  Therefore I was not paying attention to the fact that the star I was aiming for turned into a square.

This was what I was aiming for :)  I cut down the precut square for this star to 3.5" and then the coping strip was cut at 1", making a more pleasing proportion to me.

I so wish I had more of this caramel Jo Morton print and the subtle print neutral.  But, alas, I do not--only a few square inches of scraps are left.
 

Turns out I liked the second layout better.  I saved the center star block for some future playtime. Since these photos I have added borders to what will be a nice sized tablerunner--these are 8" finished blocks.  I turned my attention then to a couple of  PCOs (partially finished objects).

These tiny bits I had sewn together were left over from strips sets made for Julie's 9 patch swap of a few years ago.  I thought this would make another cute table mat and since this photo I've added borders to the long sides only.  I have just enough of this purple print for a backing, and disassembled a strip set to get enough of the leftover shirting prints to make a binding.  Sort of spring-like with the purples, maybe?  Finally, this doll quilt-along top from Lori's blog from a couple of years ago progressed no further until now.

Lori even liked my suggestion for the doll quilt's name, Pink Lemonade.  Those churn dash blocks are  small--I think they finish at 5".  Yellow and pink are very scarce in my stash and acquiring both required a couple of trips to the fabric store at the time of the quilt-along.  My iPhone photography is making the yellow rather more lemony than it is in true life. Also, the pressing job after the photo improved the top's looks.  Someday I'll get better at thinking of that before I start taking photos!

I'm going to back it with this pink print and then do big stitch hand quilting to finish it off.   See more design walls on Judy's Patchwork Times.

And now, some baby spam. 

Some Sunday evening Mimi time with Baby Cove!  I put him to sleep while mom and dad were trying to eat their dinner.  Check out those duds :)  He's 12 days old today.

Birdies have a new home

TGIF!  And to end this week, the following poorly lit photos document the drawing winner for the little Blogaversary quilt.

Grant drew the winning slip from the vessel. 

And the winner is....

Janet said, "It turned out lovely, Annie. I would be thrilled to win it!
I think you made the right choice to get rid of the "Stop Signs" and just quilt the corners, and it is nice how the birds are circling on the quilt.
Good job!!"

Congratulations, Janet!  I'll be dropping you a line for your snail mail address.  Thank you to all who expressed their kind thoughts about my little quilt made from orts, and for stopping by and looking in on my little corner of blogland!  

Orts on Thursday, and giveaway

Orts--bits and scraps of thoughts and events that land here semi-regularly.

• Isn't it funny what associated life events some calendar days never lose.  To me, March 6th will forever be the senior high school day that I got my braces off after six long years. 
• Remember that sewing instruction book I showed last week with the mod bedroom? Well, there are patterns for clothes in that 1976 published edition too.  My sister and I laughed hardest at this one:

 

Wouldn't you love to sport one of these coverups this summer? The model looks like she can barely stand another second of wearing it :)

• Our lovely rainy few days over last weekend have yet to show visible sprouted grass on our brown, brown hills.  But the weeds in my planting beds sure are perky. 
• Only one more day to enter my blogaversary giveaway, HERE. Deadline is 6 pm tomorrow night.
• The new family came over last night to help celebrate DD Erica's birthday.  Despite fears of having to eat and run, they lingered for a couple of hours and it was great to enjoy Cove's first visit to Mimi and Papa's with them.  As is to be expected, traveling with a newborn is a production, which was proven when it was time to get settled into his car seat.

 The car seat dwarfs him now, but that will change all too soon, I'm sure!

Design Wall Monday

On my design surface are more CW scraps. In cleaning up the sewing room I came across a baggie with some leftover HSTs and fabric from my Caramel Blues quilt. 

I had even sketched out an idea for a table runner. There wasn't enough fabric for the centers but I remembered a charm pack I picked up at the International Quilt Festival in Cinci a couple of years ago. But the CW squares are 4" so I need to add coping strips. As I've mentioned before, quilt MATH gets me all the time!  My coping strips are too wide at 1". Well, at least I can cut them down :).  See my last post for a blogaversary giveaway I'm having of a little CW scrappy quilt I finished over the weekend. 

I also put away all the random spools of thread and bobbins hanging around and found five nearly bare ecru spools. I use these spool ends for hand stitching but sure don't need five of them!  Wrapping all the leftovers on one spool freed up room in one thread box :)

See more design walks on Judy's Patchwork Times. 

And now, some baby spam:

I got to hold my 4 day old grandson Cove for a good hour yesterday and he was awake the whole time. Sweet baby!  The new family is happy to be home from the hospital and creating their own routine :)

A Bit Behind

Comments are now closed.  Thanks for entering my blogaversary giveaway!  Winner to be announced soon.

 
February was a very full month--besides my brother's birthday, Valentine's Day, my mother's 75th birthday, finishing the baby quilt, another trip to the hospital ER for me, our anniversary, and the ultra-excitement of the birth of our first grandchild, there was something else that I got a bit behind on.  I'm now caught up on this small Civil War scrap project, which when last shown was only a flimsy: 

Over the last couple of days I got the quilt sandwich pin basted, then promptly unbasted it about an hour later when I decided to use a motif in the plain alternate squares.  This came to me as I was fanning myself during a PSW (personal weather system) and noticed the bird emblem on the pretty Japanese fan I recently bought for said PSWs. Ahem.  Anyway, back to the quilt.

I drew a bird and then used a light box and a Frixion gel pen to transfer my drawing. Then I repinned the quilt sandwich and did some stitch in the ditch and cross-hatching with the walking foot. 

The walking foot worked just fine to stitch the bird with a contrasting thread--I'm lazy, so didn't want to change to the darning foot!

You can see in this photo where I drew corner triangles around the bird.  I decided to stitch those in the same burgundy thread I used for the bird, but changed it up as I stitched.

I showed this to my sister and she said it was too much--instead of flowing around the quilt, the eye stopped on the bird and you didn't see the other elements.  Well, it is a stop sign shape, but that wasn't my intention!  So I unsewed the octagon and told my sister she was right.  But there still wasn't enough quilting of the basic elements for me, so I added more. 

The 9 patch dark squares were fully X'd and the light patches got a "square in a square" design that I marked by scoring.  This meant a LOT of thread burying afterwards, but I think it was a good choice.  I also re-stitched those corner triangles in the cream thread to flesh out the traditional quilting I felt was needed. On to the border...

Hard to see here, but I had fun free motion quilting a sort of trellis design with dark brown thread.  

Or maybe those are L's like Laverne had on her clothes in Laverne and Shirley.  I loved that silly show.  Anyway, I used more leftovers to make the binding, a Collection for A Cause fabric I just love and used as borders on my Caramel Blues quilt.

And here is the finished quilt!  It is about 25" square and all machine sewn and machine quilted, crafted completely from leftovers.  I even stitched together batting scraps for the project!  What do you think?

The other event I didn't mention above was my five year blogiversary, which was February 5th, and I am giving away this little quilt to celebrate!  There are no hoops to jump through, except that I must have a way to contact you if you are not on Blogger--please leave your email address in the comment.  I will leave this giveaway open until Friday, March 7th, at 6 pm Pacific time, and I will ship internationally.  Thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me this last year of scanty blogging!