Sue

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.

My orange scraps yielded four Split Nine Patches made of 2.5″ squares. I love the look of these & still haven’t decided how I’m going to lay out the quilt.

I finished the orange blocks for Sliding Scale & sewed all the blocks into rows. I need to cut & sew the grunge sashing to go between all the rows, but I’ve been enjoying looking at it on the design wall so haven’t been in a big hurry. And yes, my homemade design wall is too small, so painter’s tape is holding up the ends.

I got another RSC2022 project done this week! Shine is done & I’m very happy with it. Any quilt with the metallic ombre & an Irish Chain variation is a win!

A new month & I dug into my orange scraps. First off, I got the top done for the Mini Brightly Pumpkin table topper by Cluck Cluck Sew. This is totally a scrap buster as I made it from the leftovers of my daughter-in-law’s Hocus Pocus quilt & this will be a birthday present for her next month after I quilt it.

I got the large orange Scrappy Hearts by Quilty Love done, plus the Two-Step blocks from Lissa Alexander’s book “Scrap School”, made with 2.5″ squares. Over on the right are 2 of the 6 orange blocks I need for my RSC2022 project from the Tula Pink 100 Modern Quilt Blocks book. I am attempting to slowly finish up that year’s RSC projects that have blocks made until I had my fall in August of that year. Orange are all I have left for Tula, then I can start putting it together, so I’m happy about that.

The blue & green are the Bonnie Hunter’s 2024 Leader & Ender Challenge: County Clare that I got done this week. The pumpkins rather made their own L&E’s so I didn’t need too many County Clare.

The last of the RSC2022 Catching Rainbows blocks did NOT go in the orphan block box as I said last week. Instead, I decided to power through & figure out something to do with them so they would be out of here. I made these B&W string blocks, added sashing, & another small baby donation is ready for my quilting partner to quilt up. So those RSC blocks ended up making 3 quilts!

And finally, a finish! I started this Summer Block Party quilt (on a whim) on 20 June, the first day of summer, & put the final stitch into the binding last night, 9 August. Unusually for me, this quilt went from start to finish in 7 weeks, with me keeping up with the designers dropping the patterns each week. It was a total squirrel project that I will probably keep for me, as it will be fun summer decor.

A little bit of aqua in my quilt group blocks this week, but the rest of my time has been spent in finishing up the RSC2022 Catching Rainbows project.

I put together most of the other color blocks last week into a lap quilt & was left with 7 red blocks. I made 2 more to get a nice center, then added sashing, leftover HST trims from my Cherry Crunch quilt & some strips to lengthen it out a bit. Then I made string blocks to mostly utilize Bonnie’s original border idea & voila! a small lap quilt for donation is born. And another old WIP is off the books. There are a couple Catching Rainbows blocks left but they will go in the orphan block box for another day.

And now that it’s really August: let the orange scraps come out to play!