Sue

Hooray! I got April’s red blocks done. Better late than never, right? Here are the last 2 of 5 Moda Blockheads & the Scraptastic Star by Melissa Corry.

Then I pulled out my 2.5″ square bin & worked on the 3 projects that use those: another Scraptastic Star, 4 rail fence blocks, & 6 County Fair blocks by Amy Smart from “Scrap School” by Lissa Alexander.

I cut out all the pieces for this quilt in January, so each month I pull out the kit in that color & sew. These are Scrap Stash Plus blocks from a free pattern by Quilty Love.

So I spent a good part of this week acquiring fabric rather than using it. (everybody laugh now) I spent one morning helping a friend sort her quilting supplies. She hasn’t used them in a long time & doesn’t want to in the future, so she wondered if I wanted some of the fabric. I ended up coming home with 8 project boxes full of fabric & half-done BOM blocks to use for donation quilts. Then I spent three afternoons driving all over doing the Utah Shop Hop. It’s the first time in years that I’ve gone to all the stores & it was super fun! The theme was “Ride the Radio Waves” & each store featured a classic rock singer or group. I came home from the hop with two sale kits & a bunch of carefully curated FQs in RSC colors that I needed to punch up my stash for the rest of the year.

So all the driving & shopping meant there was not much sewing going on. Acquiring fabric, not using it. Wink, wink! I managed 3 of the 5 Moda blockheads I need in red & I still have red blocks to finish, even though it’s May & green. I decided to gather up my Ocean Waves L&E blocks & sew them up to see my progress. They are 2″ HSTs from project scraps. Each circle is made from 4 blocks so the top row will have 5 large blocks & the second row is complete with 3 large blocks & a half-block on the sides. So I almost have 2 rows! Pretty good for four months of L&E sewing.

This is my red Strippy Slab Star. There’s still a few days of April left to do my other two red projects!

I managed a finish this week by getting the binding on “Catching Rainbows” from Bonnie Hunter. This was an RSC2022 project that came to a crashing halt with my fall. Last year I got it out to sew the rest of the blocks & get it together but decided I wanted a smaller lap-size quilt. I used the pastel-ish blocks to make this lap quilt. That left me with 9 red blocks that became a donation quilt & 5 various color blocks combined with B&W string blocks to make another donation. I have two projects left from RSC2022 that need to find an ending. Pretty good for all the accidents & surgeries since then!

In mid-2023 my quilt group started two Brightly quilts: Christmas & non-Christmas. We swapped Christmas fabrics & each chose leftover scraps for the other one. I gathered up all the leftovers from Songbook, added a few new FQs from Songbook2 & shopped my stash to start this one. I had a big gray chunk, so used it for background. We worked on them alternating weeks for a month, then I torpedoed us by saying I wanted the Christmas done to use in my new house for the holidays. So we worked on that & got it finished in time (yay!), then this one sat because they wanted to do something else. When we finished our tabletopper project, I lobbied to finish this since I’m trying to get WIPs done. It went together fast & the top got done this week! When will it go to the quilter? Get in line!

Apparently I cut too many squares & since I was just chain-piecing like a fool, I ended up with a bunch of random leftovers. What to do? Make a baby row quilt for donation, of course! It’s a little crazy, but hopefully someone will love it. It’s cheerful.

I got some RSC blocks made this week! Three Patchwork Hearts, four scrappy rail fence, & six County Fair blocks for the Amy Smart quilt. So 5 of my 8 block sets are done for the month & I’ve got some month left to finish the rest.

Since it’s red month & I want to get WIP’s done, I pulled out these blocks. They are from Amy Ellis‘ Modern Quilt Block Series when she was giving them away for free. I made the blocks with one red section, called Scraps, in 2021 or 2022 for a donation quilt but they got set aside. So I pulled them out & made the boxy blocks, called Option, to add to them. I got them all sewed together, pieced some batting & backing, and now it’s ready to take to my quilting partner for quilting.

My quilt group likes to make small baby quilts for Joyful Welcome, so I used the six leftover Scraps blocks & more jelly roll strips to make this little quilt. I also found batting & backing, so it’s ready to go to my partner, as well. I used up most of the reds in a batik RW&B roll I had, so during blue month I’ll have to make a blue donation quilt with those strips.

Remember that quilt group project I was working on last month? Well, we finished it, I quilted it, & finished the hand binding this week. So now it’s my spring table topper. Yay! The values of my grays & aquas in the cabins were too similar to make the wave configuration of the pattern, but I like the colors, so I’m OK with giving up the secondary pattern. My partners’ RW&B versions are more dramatic. Bonus: all the fabric came from my stash, plus the batting & backing were leftovers from another quilt, so it was a good use of scraps!

I had some eye surgery last Friday, so have only been able to sew in small chunks since then, but I managed to finish up my yellow projects. These are Scrap Stash Plus blocks from a free pattern by Quilty Love. I cut all the blocks & clipped them together in January, so I pulled out the pile of yellow/gold & when I was finished with those, I made the reds.

I also sewed up two of Angela’s 2015 Sawtooth Stars this week. March’s has a yellow Air Castle in the center & April’s has a red Broken Sugar Bowl.