January OMG and RSC-Red Goals Met!

I'm pretty excited that I've met my January goals.  A little motivation goes a long way it seems. 

My goal for OMG (One Monthly Goal) at Elm Street Quilts was to finish putting my Long Time Gone top together.  It was in five sections in December, and now it's a top.  I thought it was finished after I put the sections together, but then I looked at the instructions.  (Funny how important that is.) It seems it still needed borders.  Twelve.  Three on each side.  And pieced.  Aarrgghh!   At least I had plenty of strips in my strings basket.  As usual.

Now it's a top!  My design wall was really crowded, and my design floor was a total mess and needed to be swept, so I had to resort to the design patio. 

 

I had fun playing with reds for the RSC (Rainbow Scrap Challenge) at So Scrappy ending up with two each of the Windmill and Sawtooth Star blocks.  I also pulled a bunch of reds out of my novelty/children's/brights stash and cut them into useable sized squares and strips.  

A good month.  I wonder if I need to set more challenging goals for February.  We'll see.

Linking up with "One Monthly Goal" and "RSC2022".

Throwback Thursday - A Baby Quilt Show and Tell

 I've been looking at my spreadsheet (Yes.  I'm that person ..... but only with my quilts), and I noticed there are quite a few quilts I've never blogged about.  I thought I would start sharing them with you on Throwback Thursdays, but since it's Friday I think it's going to be more of a "Throwback Any Day!" from now on.   Here we go with a Baby Quilt Show and Tell.

In 2015 Hubby asked me to make a quilt for Walt and Mary's (first) grand-baby, and I made "Grampa's Little Genius" for them.  You can read about that here.   Two years later their second grand-baby came along, and I made "We're Just Dotty About Nora".  You can read about that here.  If you don't want to go read about them here are two itty bitty pictures.

In 2019 I made two grand-baby quilts for Mary and Walt's growing family.  The first one is simply a Carpenter's Wheel blocked enlarged to a size large enough for Baby.  Aren't these fabrics beautiful?  So soft and fresh looking.

It really made a darling quilt.

For the second grand-baby that year, a boy, I found this fun puppy fabric. Too cute!

Didn't the stripes play well with the puppy fabric?

I really like the way it turned out.  I named it "Puppy Play Date".

 

2020 saw only one grand-baby, a girl.  Her quilt is a simple patchwork quilt with a white inner border. 

  

The most recent baby has arrived and it's another little girl.  I had some pretty fabric leftover from the "Love and Friendship" line by Verna Mosquera I had used in another quilt.  You can read about that here.  This time I used a simple nine-patch and alternated with a solid square .....  

..... and pieced the back.  

I usually do a simple meander, but I tried something a little different in the borders.  The variegated thread looks sweet.  I'm not much of a "pink person", but I really like this.  

Walt and Mary's daughters are fairly young, so you never know.  I may need to start stockpiling baby quilts!

Two Quilts For the Price of One?

Still wanting to use up those batiks in my stash and having a few more nieces in line for new quilts, I decided to make a batik version of the "Radio Way" pattern by Jaybird Quilts for my niece, Laura.  I had lots of time at home during my Covid isolation, and what better way to use that time than to make quilts?  It didn't hurt that some of my online quilty friends were doing a sew-along using this pattern, and I wanted to play along.

I really enjoyed working on such an easy pattern.  How simple are these blocks?!

See those hashtag marks on the notepad in the first photo?  Once again, they don't mean anything.   I ended up with twice as many blocks as I needed.  What is wrong with me?  Don't answer that!  lol

So, double the blocks means two quilts.  For the price of one?  Not technically, but since everything was from my stash, I'm saying, "Yes!"  One for Laura .....

..... and one for my son, Aaron .....

..... because he said, when I sent him a picture of the blocks in a text message, "I really like that!" 

I chose some of the lighter (and pinker!) blocks for Laura's quilt and used the darker and more neutral blocks for Aaron's.  Then I used some of the leftover strips on the backing of Aaron's quilt.

The tree branches on the lower right are just from a shadow.  I wish I had thought of that, though.  It's kinda cool.

Linking up with  "Oh Scrap!"

"Long Time Gone"

My January OMG (One Monthly Goal) is to finish putting together my Jen Kingwell quilt top.  I thought I should share the background on that so you can celebrate with me when I finish.  

Last February, almost a year ago now, my quilty friend Denise suggested we do a Jen Kingwell sew-along, and she chose the "Long Time Gone" pattern.  It isn't the style quilt I usually make, but I was onboard.  

It has a lot of little tiny pieces.  Like 1" x 1.5" strips for the Courthouse Steps blocks .....  

..... and 3" x 1.5" Flying Geese units .....

..... and 1.5" Half-Square-Triangles.

Every block has lots and lots of pieces!

Except for the Bow Tie block for some reason.  

I felt like it stood out, so I swapped that block of four 6" Bow Ties to my own block of sixteen 3" Bow Ties.  I must have been in a baby block mood!

Another change I made was to replace the 60-degree triangle blocks called for .....

 

..... with itty bitty Square-in-a-Square blocks and teeny weeny Economy blocks.   I must confess that it was only because no matter how hard I tried I could not make a 60-degree triangle block.  

I made some ridiculously small Pineapple Log Cabin blocks, too!

Putting those together accurately was fun.  It took a lot of pinning!

The construction of the top was easier than I thought it might be.  Blocks were put together into six sections.   Here they are all ready and waiting to be put together into a top.  Look at those tiny Monkey Wrench blocks!

It's pretty close to being finished.  Now it needs borders.  I may just make that One Monthly Goal!

Linking up with Oh Scrap!

Show and Tell - Fall Swap Blocks

One of my Covid isolation finishes was completing a block swap quilt.  I had participated in the swap with a group of online friends a few years ago, 2018 to be exact, and needed to get this off the UFO list.  The guidelines for this swap were to make a 10" block with fall colors and use Kona Bone for the background.  We each made fifteen blocks, kept one, and mailed the rest out to the other participants.  I was really happy with the blocks I received.  Swaps can be a little risky, but that's half the fun!  [photo credit Krystal Kane]

I made the block in the upper left corner.  I wanted to make sunflower blocks, but all the sunflower block patterns I could find online were pretty complicated, and since I had to make fifteen of them, I decided to call this a sunflower.  

Coming up with an arrangement I was happy with (and that didn't look like a traditional sampler quilt) was another opportunity to play!  Once I had all the blocks up on the design wall I started filling in the spaces with pinwheels, flying geese, and more.  Playing always creates a huge mess.  At least it does in my sewing room!

I played with the quilting too.  I mostly use a meander on my quilts, because I'm not very good with Free Motion Quilting so I had fun trying my hand at different designs.  Mostly just squiggly stuff.  It works, and I don't have to sew straight lines!

I tried my hand at designing my own block since I had to make an extra to round out the group.  I just cut out pieces and kept rearranging them until I had this.  You can see where I had to do some odd piecing by adding rectangles to make things fit.  Maybe not the best way to go about it, but I really like it.

It was fun.  I should do that more often! 

I really enjoyed making this quilt.  

And I decided to keep it.  It's mine!  What a concept, right?

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - Red for January

The first time I participated in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was also my last time, and I didn't do great.  Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it.  I made it my goal to make a donation baby quilt each month, and I did make three.  That's not too shabby, but I was disappointed that I didn't do more.  For 2022 I'm taking a little more reasonable approach and just making blocks in the color of the month to use in projects towards the end of the year.

Angela at "So Scrappy" announced that the RSC2022 color for January is RED!  I'll be making two blocks each month, a Sawtooth Star block with a cute Paddington Bear background and a Windmill Block with a blue on white dotted fabric for the background.  I don't know how far I'll get with those stars since I don't have much of the Paddington Bear fabric.  I guess that's kind of the point of using up your stash though.

I looked through my scrap bins and found some 2.5" x 4.5" bricks and decided I should work through those this year, too.  

There were 60 red bricks.  I cut some 2.5" squares from a background fabric and sewed them together end to end.  I have no idea what I will do with these, but I'm sure I'll come up with something.  I do not need to add any more UFOs to my list! 

This is the entirety of my red stash and scraps.  

I think I see some trips to my Local Quilt Shops in the near future!

Linking up with So Scrappy RSC2022

Improv Quilts for Steve and Ginger

I've been blogging recently about the quilts I managed to finish during the last nearly two years while isolating because of the Covid pandemic.  I was in a funk for about the first six months of isolation and not sewing at all, but then I started making up for lost time.  Now I'm playing catch-up on my blog.  

After I made the quilt for Shirley A using orphan blocks (read about that here) I had a few teal crumb blocks left and set them aside to do something else with. 

I shopped my stash and found these 2.5" strips left from Kacie's quilt (read about that here).

Then I raided my stash again and dug through my scraps and pulled more teals.

Then - you guessed it - play time!  Scrappy quilts need scrappy borders .....

..... and scrappy cornerstones .....

..... and a happy finish.

  

Once I decided that this would be the perfect quilt for my sister-in-law, Ginger, I wanted to make a similar quilt for my brother-in-law, Steve.  Oh, boy!  More play time!  I'm starting to like this whole improv thing!  

Steve's quilt started out with orphan blocks, too.  I used mostly batiks to make more crumb blocks .....

..... added bits and pieces of a fun shade of yellow .....

..... started playing .....

..... and, you guessed it!  Another happy finish!  

My favorite part of making these quilts was gifting them to two very special people.  I wish I could have done that in person, but the photo they sent me is the next best thing.

Love those smiles!

Linking up with "Oh Scrap!"