Quilting

This is my big rainbow accomplishment for the week. All my strings went from big boxes labelled Neutral, Warm, & Cool, to these smaller bins. Now they are sorted into colors so I can easily find what I’m looking for & even though they’re not as cute as Angela’s baskets, I’m happy. Bring on the string projects!!! I also did a major overhaul of the closet now that I’ve been working from it for a year & know what I need to get to more often. Hard work, but nice fall cleaning.

Not much sewing this week as we were on a little trip for part of it. But I did get a few more stars done for my Breast Cancer quilt. Need 15 total as they alternate with some strip pieced blocks that need to be made. These are wild.

There was car sewing, however, as I worked on wool ornaments & finished binding Jamestown Landing by Bonnie Hunter.

It got a red rock photo shoot since I finished it on the way down. I got this pattern book for Mother’s Day & got going right away on this quilt. Now it’s done, which is fast for me to go from start to finish, as flimsies get caught in the TBQ pile, then the To Be Bound pile & often languish for quite a while.

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.