Sue

If you’re tired of seeing my slow progress on these gift baskets, then you’ll be pleased to see that I’m DONE! Last photo of these baskets you will need to see. So much of life has intruded on my limited sewing time that these took me SO MUCH LONGER to make than I anticipated. But they are done & turned out pretty cute, so hopefully each of my quilt group ladies will find a color palette they like at our Christmas luncheon next month.

In my one hour of free sewing yesterday, I was able to start on assembly of an RSC2025 project. Yippee! I made the strip sets & subcut them, then started sewing them into 9-patches. These are part of the sashing for Scraptastic Stars by Melissa Corry of HappyQuilting. Although I’ve made several of her patterns, this is the first one of hers I purchased & never got around to making it. I’m super excited to get this one done this year. Looking at how little time I have to sew each week, I’m unsure if I will get all my RSC2025 projects assembled this year, but this one is a definite!

We had a delayed 40th anniversary trip to Hawaii for the last part of October!! It was 18 months overdue because of health issues & it was our first time to visit. So great! We went to Laie & Honolulu on Oahu, then Kona on Hawaii. I read about Queen Liliuokalani when I was a girl & have always wanted to visit the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, so it was on our list of things to do. We spent a while in the room where she made a crazy quilt while she was imprisoned after being overthrown by the American business owners. This is one of the squares.

Assembling my RSC2025 quilts has not yet begun. (sad face) And even though I haven’t yet finished the tops for the last two quilt group projects, we started a new one this week, so I spent my few hours of sewing time on cutting background fabric. I cut one blue fabric at group & started sewing flying geese for the stars. I put together two of them so that I could feel like I had accomplished something after sewing so many parts.

The good news is that I finished hand binding the last of these four donation quilts this week. The three lap quilts will be going to the Gift Boutique at Festival of Trees for Primary Children’s Hospital & the baby will go to Joyful Welcome for unwed & teen moms at local hospitals in Utah. The red quilts are much cuter in person with the scrappy low volumes I’m famous for using. 🙂

I got the binding on the Frightful Fun! BOM just before leaving for vacation. Yay! For those of you who have watched this coming together all year, thanks for your encouragement. I’m very happy with it & now feel able to tackle just about any FPP project I could desire.

I got the final two Scraptastic Stars by Melissa Corry sewed together so next month I’ll start the sashing & put it together for an RSC2025 flimsy finish! I also made another charity block drive star for Many Hands & Many Hearts, bringing my total to four. I was cutting gold & figured I could do double duty. Hopefully, more can get done next month.

It’s been a busy week & I haven’t gotten a ton of sewing done, but 6 of the 12 fabric baskets needed as Christmas gifts for my Monday AM quilt group are finished. These are the result of those panels I’ve been sewing lately. It’s my first attempt at something like this & I learned some things, so the other half should go quickly next month & be ready for gifting in December.

Over last weekend, I did hand-quilting & binding on the October banner. So it’s done on display! I may start on the December banner soon. We’ll see. Note: this is straighter in real life than it looks in the photo. Whew!

As I’ve said before, sometimes you have to do tasks to move projects along. My Ocean Waves L&E project had many HSTs sewn & in a pile, but I needed to use them in blocks. So I spent a couple hours trimming, pressing, & sorting them into color piles. Now they are ready to sew into more blocks. Although I don’t seem to have much green, so need to dig into scrap piles to make more HSTs. Sigh.

I had two of these basket exterior panels made at the end of last week & now I have all twelve made. They will be the Christmas gifts for my Monday quilt group. I need to quilt them, sew them into baskets, & add the binding. Hopefully, next week’s post will have a photo of a couple finished!

Hand binding is continuing in the evenings on some donation quilts, so I’ll do a photo when all four are done. I’m on the fourth now.