My company is closed for the week between Christmas and New Years. With no travel plans, I treated myself to a quilter’s stay-cation and focused on my own pile of unfinished tops. I quilted 7 tops, bound 1 that was already quilted and bound 5 of the 7 that I quilted.
Then, this weekend, I finished a top for a friend.
I also recreated this little PQ Challenge quilt from last year. So, I guess that’s another finish. I’ve decided to start my year from the day after Christmas since I can’t really remember which one I finished which day.
So, my stats so far this year are:
7 finishes of my own (6 UFO’s, 1 new)
1 quilting for someone else.
As of right now, I have four quilts waiting for binding but it’s the kickoff week for Project Quilting so I’ll be creating my “mythical creature” quilt this week. Maybe I can squeak out a binding and finish 2 more this week!
Oh, the feels! For years, I’ve loved playing along with the blog hops and the lovely Carol and Joan are hanging up their cat herding hats. I’ve had blog hops to push me to try new things, finish projects, and enjoyed so much inspiration and connection. I so appreciate all these ladies have done to make the quilting world a cozier, more intimate space. However, both will be continuing their wonderful projects like the Scared Silly Boo Along. Make sure you are connected to the Cackling Stitches Facebook group. As for me, I’m going to try to be a more faithful updater. I have an updated sewing space and lots of UFO’s…so stay tuned.
In the meantime, back to the subject at hand. I love the Virtual Christmas Cookie exchange because it gives me an excuse to try a new recipe. I can’t have gluten or nuts so sometimes baking is trickier. This year, I’ve had lemon on the brain so I went searching for a really nice lemon cookie. I found this recipe for a lemon crinkle cookie over at The Loopy Whisk and, wow! Just wow! These may be my newest favorite cookie. (They were so good that I had to send them away in self defense…LOL.) The light lemon flavor makes such a nice contrast to heavier sweets.
In celebration of the season, I took the opportunity to finally bind this Christmas quilt. My dear friend, Margot, suggested that I could use the back of the couch as a revolving quilt display and here it is on the back of the couch. With Milo, of course, office holder-down-of-quilts-on-the-couch.
Be sure to hop over to all the other talented quilters who have been playing along. There’s a huge amount of talent in this group. And a very special thank you to Carol from Just Let Me Quilt. You are a star!
Over the years, I’ve had such fun playing along with the various blog hops. Times change and the time had come that the lovely Joan at MooseStash Quilting has decided to retire from cat herding (I mean blog hop hostessing.) So, of course I wanted to play along one last time. Gnomes are as cute as can be but I’ve never actually made one. I found this adorable free tutorial at Sew She Can! With his kitchen-patterned hat, this must be a baking gnome!
I originally planned to make a pillow but I’m kind of enamored of the little guy and I’m wondering if he needs a little more space to move around….and maybe a tree, or two…a little cabin in the woods. I think He’ll hang out on the design wall a litle longer until I decide what to do.
In the meantime, hop on along to the other bloggers and see what they’re bringing home for the holidays! And come back to visit…there’s a virtual cookie exchange coming and I haven’t even shared about my recent trip to South Korea!
We all know I can’t resist a hop and a hop about kindness…well, what could be better? I can hardly believe that I haven’t posted since July! It’s been a bit of a wild ride this summer as I replaced the carpet in 80% of my house with laminate flooring. The other 20% was already tile. My allergies have been thanking me but I’m still trying to recover my spaces. (Imagine having to move EVERYTHING in the sewing room to one side…and then move it back!) There’s been a lot of pitching and sorting going on. I’m trying to make sure more things are leaving than are coming in. Well, not fabric things…LOL.
There are so many wonderful people in my life that I’d like to bless with a quilt so I thought I’d share two recent projects. The first is made from leftover flying geese from another project. It’s going to be leaving to go to a friend soon. The Sawtooth Star is my all-time favorite block and my go-to since it’s so very versitile. I’ve used this one many, many times!
In fact, I’ve used it so many times that it almost sews itself! This is not a great photo (I’ll try to get a daylight photo tomorrow) but you can see the stars made from the leftover geese.
This 70×70 large lap quilt used up all those stray flying geese and was quilted with an allover pattern called Rebekah’s Roses from Urban Elementz.
My other current favorite is a free pattern you can grab here. The chandelier pattern from Lella Boutique is a quick and fun quilt that gives you lots of bang for your buck. I used this pattern for the “Kitchen Inspired” project for Project Quilting and loved it! The directions are nice and clear. I made one last Christmas for my nephew and I can give you a sneak peek at the newest one.
For this one, I only used two fabrics. One is an ombre and it looks like it’s going to be one of my favorites. I also saw this done up in random holiday fabrics….I can see one of those in my future, too! This is the first one I made. If you’re looking for a fun project to add some joy into someone’s life, consider a chandelier. It’s quick and easy making it kind on you and the recipient. This one was made with three different ombres and I shared my speedy construction methods in a previous post.
Now that kayaking season is coming to a close (boo!) and the house is somewhat together, expect to see a flurry of finishes. As I type this, the longarm is whirring away, Milo is purring beside me, 48 pints of tomato sauce are cooling in the kitchen and I’m looking forward to a new work week. I am going to be kind to me and not try to finish the crazily dense quilting I started yesterday. Each pass of across this 60-inch quilt is taking about an hour…and almost a full bobbin! It will be boo-ti-ful when it is done, though!
Thanks for stopping by, bee sure to check out the other wonderfully kind quilters on this hop! They’re a honey of a bunch and we have the sweetest “Queen Bee” in Joan over at Moosestash Quilting! I appreciate being able to play along!
Today is my day on the Something Smells Fishy blog hop hosted by Carol over at Just Let Me Quilt. As usual, I had tons of ideas but I just kept circling back to the leftover Baby Shark fabric. Now, that might have been uppermost in my mind since seeing an actual shark in the wild for the first time in Hawaii in April. Or, it may be that I was just excited to use up the last of such cute fabric!
These are not the most clear photos as I was racing the light to get the top outside butyou can see just how cute the fabric is. Added bonus, you can end up with the song stuck in your head! A quilt with it’s own soundtrack!
I went round and round about background fabric and finally decided on a lovely ombre with shades from pale green to deep teal. I had a lot of fun playing with the triangles to try to get the shading right. The photo, however, doesn’t want to flip over without cropping so I’ll leave that for morning, too. (Here’s the updated photo on the top. My phone seems to want to invert all my photos…sigh,) It’s really cool to see how much difference a little daylight makes!
I plan to add some ombre borders and finish it off with a shark quilting motif. And, of course, I’ll probably be humming Baby Shark the whole time, doo doo!
Please hop over and see all the other awesome fishy projects…I bet you’ll fall in love with them hook, line and sinker! And show Carol some love for all her hard work. I’m sure that keeping this quilting “school” of fishy creators together has kept her on her toes.
Ever since I first saw the block lotto bird blocks, I’ve wanted to try them. They just made me smile. With one thing and another, they kept getting pushed back to the back of the list. Then came the perfect hop and I knew I had to move my dream flock to the top of the list! Joan, over at Moosestash Quilting put together the hop with a bunch of talented stitch-ests from all over the web. I always feel honored to get to play along in this talented group. Many thanks to Joan for her exceptional cat-herding skills!
These blocks start out with a square and some background fabric. Honestly, looking at my rather, well, lets just say “well-endowed” stash, I was unsure where to start. I finally grabbed the piece of blue batik that has been floating around on the cutting table and spotted a piece of Kaffe fabric on the top of the bin where I keep pieces for string blocks. At first the cutting seemed a bit fiddly, but once I got the system down, it was fun! My first two birds had a pretty wide stance so I lke to think they’re striding purposefully somewhere, maybe to the feeder? The next four blocks came from two stray charm squares and another piece out of the string box.
You can find the video tutorial for these birds here.
Here’s the start of my little flock. I’m looking forward to a whole bunch more!
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I’m looking forward to playing with more of my scraps and building more of these little blocks. I’m thinking I need some pink birds and some birds with red chests like the robins I’m seeing in my yard. And, of course, I’ll need some crows because I love crows!
Speaking of birds in your back yard, have you tried the Merlin App? It’s a free app that lets you sound ID the birds in your yard. So far, I’ve identified about 8 different birds that visit my yard. I put bird feeders in my back yard a few years ago thinking that my cats would enjoy “Bird TV” from the window but it furns out I like watching the birds far more than they do.
While I work on growing my little flock, head on over to this talented group of quilters and check out all the fine-feathered projects on display!
It’s that time! Summer is coming, camping season is starting and we’re all dreaming of travel…and quilts, and fabric and…OK, you should know by now that you can start anywhere and it always comes back to quilts for me! I had a plan as soon as I heard that Carol was putting us on the road this month! I’ve had this lovely piece of train fabric hanging out in the sewing room and I’ve been wanting to use it.
Doesn’t that look fun? So, I was planning to use my favorite sawtooth stars but the print is just too big to put into 6.5 squares. These trains need a little more open space than that. I started rooting through some things and came up with some block pieces left over from three car quilts I made in the past. I was thinking of “Planes, trains and automobiles” but that didn’t seem to fit either. So I started making more car blocks. I’m still not sure if I am stopping at six to do a lap quilt or if this is headed for larger. (Well, who am I kidding, it will be larger.)
The finished quilt will look like this one. This was the first of what will be at least four of these quilts. This one was my husband’s and it was one of his favorites.
Then my younger brother saw it so I made one for him. (He’s older than I am but I have two older brothers so I shorten ‘the younger of my older brothers’ to just ‘younger’.) Then last winter I called my brother up to ask how he was doing in the super cold weather in Montana. He said his three quilts I made him were keeping him warm. “Three?” I asked. “Three. The bow tie and the two car quilts.” Seriously? Have you ever made someone a quilt and forgotten you did it? And then made it again? It’s lucky for me that he really liked that quilt! And, no, I’m not sending him this one!
It’s been busy around here since getting back from Hawaii. It’s the end of the school year and we’re all scrambling. Tomorrow, I have two meetings so I spent tonight doing some serious baking. A spice cake, two types of scones (cranberry orange and chocolate chip) and a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. They are all gluten-free and the best compliment I ever receive is when people don’t even notice the lack of gluten.
In other household news, the foundation was poured for my shed and Gizmo thinks he got a new pat-a-meow. He’ll be sad when the shed is moved back into place. Now that we have some nice weather, he and Milo go on guided expeditions to the back yard when I get home from work.
We had quite the adventure the other day when I looked up and a mama duck and her nine ducklings where making their way through my backyard. The nearest water is a short block away and I have no idea where this little family was going but my yard was the shortcut.
Luckily, neither cat recognized them as something to chase and I opened the side gate in time for the harrassed mama duck to get all of her little family safely on the other side. The cats have grown used to seeing the squirrels and the crows that come to the feeder but this was a new one for all of us!
Please make sure you hop down the road to all the other wonderful bloggers on the hop and especially show some love to Carol for keeping us in a row…I’m sure we’re tougher than ducklings!
First, my apologies for the late post. We are on island time and I lost track of my days! Thank you to Joan for putting all this together! She always has the best groups!
However, I was in a bit of a home unproven work and travel frenzy and my planned project never made it out of the starting gate. However, I did manage a bit of slow stitching on a herd of kitties! Full disclosure, my friend did the creative work on these little guys, I’m just (awkwardly and slowly) doing the final stitching.
Each cat is designed to look like a specific cat. This one is my grand-kitty, Bean.
I also finished three last of three quilts for our friend, Amber. Now that I’ve upgraded to automation on my machine, I’m having fun playing with patterns.
Spring in Oregon always brings so much beauty and we went to the Tulip Festival. I always feel so inspired by all the color!
And, of course, even though I’m on vacation, it wouldn’t complete without a trip to the local quilt shop. The Calico Cat was a fun store with lovely fabrics and a very kind and lively owner.
I used admirable restraint but how could I resist pink batik with turtles? Seriously?
We’ve had a lovely trip and it’s been great just hanging out at the beach and spending time with my daughters.
So, again, my apologies, I’ll share more soon about the protect that didn’t launch but, in the meantime, enjoy the following amazing sewists…
Appropriately, I was listening to Tana French’s new book, the Hunter, this week. A great story set in Ireland was the perfect backdrop for an Irish Chain challenge.
In the end, I made a small single Irish Chain in red and white.
I do have on my “want to make” list a large scrappy Irish Chain but not this week.
Thanks again, to Kim and Trish for a season of challenges that enrich my quilting life.
The Give It A Whirl Blog Hop is this week thanks to the lovely Carol at Just Let Me Quilt. We were challenged to use spinny things. Pinwheels, Dresden Plates, whatever brought the motion, you know?
Well, I knew I had the perfect to lurking around for this one. This was a project that started with one of my oldest UFO’s, the Dresden center. This was my very first applique block from the 1980’s. Later I started adding borders, but the quilt grew a bit longer than wide into a sort of extra long twin sized quilt. Or a lap quilt for someone very tall.
The hop got me pulling this off the stack and onto the long arm. I was all excited to get it bound and finished but my week got derailed by Covid. By the time I was up again, Oregon was putting on its annual “Let me fool you into thinking it’s summer” weekend. That’s when we get lured into thinking there will be an early spring only to get suckered into plant buying. Then the rain will come back until late May! In the meantime, the cats were SO excited. We all enjoyed some fresh air and sunshine.
Be sure you check out the rest of the hoppers…. your head will be spinning with a the great projects!
Words & Stitches 