Sue

I needed my design wall, so I sewed together Patchwork Hearts & that’s my first RSC2024 flimsy! I’m still loving the cuteness, but it may be a while before it’s quilted & all done, so it’s in the closet.

I made brown & gray large Scrappy Hearts but need more, so maybe a catch-up before the end of the year.

A black & a gray set of split 9-patches, leaves only brown now. I laid them all out & am going with this layout with a strip between to offset them in columns. I’m leaving them on the wall & will slowly sew together the four blocks into a 4-patch.

Four black rail fence blocks with 2.5″ squares. I also got a bunch of County Clare Leader & Ender Challenge blocks done this week, but haven’t sashed them yet. Maybe next week I’ll get them together & see my progress, but next week’s focus needs to be the Breast Cancer Awareness quilt I started.

My vestibular physical therapist is giving me outings to work my balance & get better at navigating different spaces since the surgery. He wanted me to go to a garden & I said I’d been talking myself out of going to Garden of Quilts because of the uneven terrain, but if he thought I could do it, then I wanted to try. Hubby went with me & it was so great! I haven’t been since the first year & have wanted to go again. So many lovely quilts & although I got dizzy a few times, I recovered quickly & we saw the whole thing, including a Q&A with the Doan girls!

I made these gray Two-Step blocks from Lissa Alexander’s book “Scrap School”, using 2.5″ squares. I got out the year’s worth of colors & laid them out on the design wall to see where I’m at with this quilt. By putting together about 20 more in previous month’s colors I had a good size lap quilt, so the columns are all clipped together & ready for webbing in the next month or so.

I also got out the Patchwork Hearts by Quilty Love to make the gray hearts & laid them out to find out I’d messed up on the blue month & made an extra, so when laying it out, I decided to make another purple & not have any gray. It’s been on the wall for several days because I don’t have time to sew it together right now & I just stop & gasp at the cuteness every time I walk in the studio, so for now it’s eye candy!

You may remember seeing this tabletopper flimsy done last month. Well, I quilted it & did the binding this week so it’s a finish. And it was gifted to my daughter-in-law for her birthday to match her quilt from last birthday. She was very surprised!

And this week I pieced, quilted, & bound this tabletopper for my November decorating, thus continuing my goal of getting square toppers made for my new square dining table. It’s from a free Moda Countdown to Christmas block giveaway a few years ago. This is called Snowfall by Lisa Jo Girodat at Neverlandstitches.com. So nice to actually use free block patterns I have saved. LOL

This is what I’m working on now: my fourth Breast Cancer Awareness quilt. I make one annually in Sept since my friend passed away in Sept 2021. I bought this kit on sale last Sept & have saved it all year to make now. I got it all cut out & was feeling good about myself.

Then I just got busy making 120 HSTs. Good! Then I started on the hearts. Then I put a couple blocks together. So I’m well on my way now.

Since this month is black, plus Cynthia announced the charity block drive for this quarter & it has black squares, I decided to just spend the week sewing as many as I could get done. It turned into 57! I thought it would use up these color chunks I have hanging around, but all those 5″ squares didn’t finish them off! Scraps forever! LOL

If you want to make some Jewel Box blocks, all the info is here: Block Drive-Jewel Box blocks.

Design wall mania! I’m all done with orange so this week was dedicated to working on a WIP: River Log Cabin by Amy Ellis. I got about half the blocks made from all the cut pieces that have been languishing in a box for more than a year. Also showing off is my progress on the blue & green 2024 Leader & Ender Challenge: County Clare blocks from Bonnie Hunter. In true L&E fashion, I’m just putting them together as I go & if the same blue ends up side by side, I’m not fussed. Since I hate sewing sashing & especially long rows of it, I’m sashing the blocks as I go, then sewing a row to the whole. Very satisfying.

I dug into my previously cut pile of 2.5″ squares to produce 4 rail fence blocks. These are fun sewing & I’m thinking about a quilt layout. Rainbow order or mixed up? Sew the 4 of each color into a block with sashing surrounding? Hmmm.

And the design wall at the end of the day Friday shows 8 wonky FPP Lori Holt hearts on the right in 2 shades of orange, with some blue & green 2024 Leader & Ender Challenge: County Clare blocks from Bonnie Hunter. On the left are Patchwork Hearts by Quilty Love. I made a plan at the beginning of the year of how I wanted the rainbow to flow down the quilt, so there are 3 coral, 2 peach, & 4 orange hearts this month, thus running the gamut of orange. The scrappy block on the far left is a test block of Ocean Waves from The Little Mushroom Cap using leftover HST’s trimmed into 2″ squares. I watched her class at the recent Scrap Summit & thought it would be a great way to slowly use up my piles of cut-off HST’s. I like it & think it will stick around. Look for a quilt in a couple years!

Tula Pink 100 Modern Quilt Blocks-Sliding Scale got to the flimsy stage this week & to the quilter, so I’m very, very happy to have another RSC2022 project almost done.