Rainbow Scrap Challenge - May

I decided to focus on the single color blocks first and wait to see what else my sky needs at the end, so... after skipping the multi-colored blocks in April, I'm back in with some green blocks for May!

Apparently I don't use much in the subtler tones of light green, but I think the palette should even out a bit when the yellow and neutral blocks join the party!

Linking up with Scrap Happy Saturday.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - March

Red is the most recently selected color of the rainbow over at soscrappy, and two more scrap jar stars have now been added to my collection!

I don't have a very wide selection of reds, and though I keep waffling about whether the star points have enough contrast against the black... I think I was able to find a few good lights and darks.

I've been trying to pick fabrics for the corners that start to branch out from the color of the month, and to that end the corners of March have some rainbow squiggles on them. However, it is possible that I have been forgetting they are part of the fabric and have been trying to pick threads off of the corners.  Whoops! 

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and Scrap Happy Saturday.

Rainbow Scrappy Challenge - Getting Started!

I finally did it!  I finally joined the rainbow scrap challenge.  A slew of deadlines hit in January, and then the quilt parade was so pretty, that I just couldn't resist picking up a nice slow project.

I am using my scraps to make Amber's Scrap Jar Stars (from A Little Bit Biased).  I haven't seen this block paired with a dark background, and I do love rainbows on black backgrounds, so this star strewn fabric was given new purpose.  I was even able to start with the scraps from my first project!

January's Purple stars were made mostly from my scrap bins.  The larger points broke into the larger, less scrappy scraps, but all fabrics had already been used. 

On the other hand, February are a mix of scrap jar stars and stash shelf stars.  Apparently I have more plans to use teal than actually teal usage.  I clearly need to work on that!  I love all the little fussy cut pieces that turned up in February though - the light-bulb and the atom are my favorite pieces!

Linking up with soscrappy and Fabric Frenzy Friday.

Long Arm Trials

For some time now, the winter weather has been getting in the way of my ability to go try out some of the long arms I have been considering... but at the very end of last week, the forecast was cold and clear.  So I quickly whipped up a small quilt top from my stash and packed my bags for a trip to the Gammill dealer!

Apparently my stash is light on solids and neutrals, a fact which might need to be remedied for the future, but this black and white dot sashing worked out nicely!

The people at the Gammill dealer were very fun and knowledgable, and it was a pleasure to work with them.  I spent all of Saturday working my way through the quilting process and I am really excited about how my little quilt turned out!  There may be a Gammill machine in my future!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social.

Baby Panel Progress

I've been having fun slowly working with my rainbow scraps.  All of the colorful scrap fabrics are now cut down to size for making triangles.

I cut my fabric for making half square triangles with a one inch allowance.  The standard 7/8ths allowance for HSTs always has me running up against the edge of too small, and that is no fun.

One yellow scrap got removed from the running because it was too narrow, but I have more than enough yellows.  And having one less fabric helped make my layout work more smoothly; now I will have four triangles of each color.

Seams Easy "ruler" for marking HSTs

The other side of these colorful HST blocks will be black to match the inner and outer border, so I also cut 42 black squares.  That went much faster!

Instead of using chalk for marking this time, which leaves thick lines and extends my seam allowance, I went to Joann's and got a new tool.  It's a mechanical pencil by Fons & Porter.  I thought the marking medium was a very thin chalk, but it's not.  It's similar to pencil lead.

So far I'm quite happy with it.  It leaves thin, clean lines; and the eraser works well for removing the lines both immediately and after several days of sitting.

I also attached the first round of borders to the panel.

There was some math involved in making the inner borders.  First the panel didn't come out to be a nice even size, I believe the finished size was 22.25 x 27.25.  That seemed odd to me, why an extra 1/4 inch?  Then the borders also had to be coordinated with the size of the triangles in the middle border so that the corner triangles would line up correctly.

Panel built up to 27x33

Don't forget that voting is open for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  I hope you'll consider voting for my little duckies.  Please and thank you!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and W.i.P Wednesday.

A Little Bit of Everything

I worked on a little bit of everything this week.  Everything, that is, except for getting the borders on my maple quilt.  That's okay, it's not like I'm bringing a finished top to a quilter this Saturday.  Oh, wait...

So instead of working on the maple leaf borders, I started pulling fabric to make borders for a baby quilt that has come up.  It took a bit of finessing, but I'm finally happy with all the color transitions.  Now this quilt is waiting for me to want to make little HST.  So much for swearing off triangles after all those maple leaves.  It didn't take me long, the maple quilt isn't even finished and I'm back on the wagon.










Next up I started cutting fabric for a quilt that was supposed to be made at a mystery weekend two years ago!  I was sure it had been patient long enough.


I do like my rainbow palette, but you probably can't tell.


Last but not least, I'm still trying to finish April on my cross-stitch sampler.  I gave my little critter a face and now he needs ears.  Almost there.  I might not even get to May before the end of the month at this rate!

Linking up to Let's Bee Social and WiP Wednesday.

Common Ground

One last look backwards before starting to create for the new year...

The last piece that I finished in 2013 was this wall hanging.  I'm very proud of this piece.  It was an interesting challenge to construct a quilt from a non-quilter's pattern and very meaningful to be able to make this for my niece.  In addition, it is the first piece that I managed to make mostly from my stash!

Common Ground
24 x 24"
Machine pieced, Hand quilted.

I may have attached the sleeve in a hotel room the evening before we flew out of town.  Excellent conditions to work on my first sleeve in at least eight years.  When I had to un-stitch part to fix it, that small little hotel room was not a very nice place to be.  I think my husband may be a saint.

Linking up to Let's Bee Social.

An Orphan Finds New Life

Obviously thrown together without care.

 An orphan block that is...

Once upon a time I put this block together intending, I think, to continue adding blocks to it until I had a scrappy rail fence quilt.  The flaw in this plan being that I've never been known to handle scrappy well (although I am trying to expand out of my comfort zone - slowly).

After months of not finding anything in my stash or my scrap bin that I wanted to expand this block with, followed by months and months of leaving the poor block sitting in a dark corner of my UFO bag, I decided it was time to pull it out and do something with it!

Revitalized!

I thought it would probably make a decent pillow, but the block didn't really seem to stand on it's own.  I felt a rail fence pinwheel would probably be better as an independent block.

When I took the center seams apart, the rail blocks were about 6.5 inches wide by an assortment of sizes long.  I'm not sure why I thought that was a good idea, so I started by trimming the blocks down into squares.  (Much better!)  Then I rotated them around and tried again.

So here it is: one 12.5 inch block ready for some experimental machine quilting and life as a pillow!

Linking up with Design Wall Monday, Fabric Tuesday, and WiP Wednesday.

Scraps

Ever since I've started quilting, I've saved scraps of fabric.  Pretty much every scrap: big scraps, small scraps... my mom's scraps (Hi mom!)...  pieces smaller than I want to use, even.  I would open my scrap box, stuff in the new scraps, and that would be that.

But I recently decided to take a chance and open an etsy store, which prompted me to start making some small items.  So I opened up the shoe box that contained my scraps, and fabric that hasn't seen the light of day for a while now has hope of being used again.

Well the first thing to do was to change my storage method.  Every time I went to look for a scrap I had to pull every piece out of the shoe box, one by one, and the piece I wanted was invariably on the bottom of the box.  So I went and got some bins, and now my scraps are separated by color.  There were only eight drawers so some colors have to share, but it's much, much better than it's been.

Well, if you've made it through all that, I do have some sewing to share.  I've been wanting to make a winged square block, so I pulled out some scraps, and found all those triangles already sewn!  I took that as a sign.  I think my favorite part is the yellow circle centered in the middle of that small square in the upper right!

One winged quilt square, ready for some quilting!

Quilt Plan

Now I'm trying to figure out how to quilt it.  I have a quilt plan, ambitious as usual, and I am primarily a hand quilter.  But I was shocked at how long it took me to hand quilt the last pillow I completed, and the quilting wasn't even that complex or dense!

So I'm looking for some advice.  Do go with my original quilt plan and hand quilt it?  Do I come up with a quilt plan that I can execute on my machine?  Or do I compromise and do a little bit of both?

Linking up with W.i.P Wednesday.