RAINBOW SCRAP CHALLENGE FOR FEBRUARY

Today was my day to wrap up a few February items.  I finished the orange blocks for the soscrappy challenge - continuing with my faux log cabin blocks:

Apparently, I forgot how many blocks I had made in green for January and overshot the mark.  I made 8 orange blocks and I only have 6 green ones.  I'll have to go back and make two more greens because that number gives you more design options.  Here they are together:

And I also finished up another Challenge.  A member of the Sunshine On-line Quilt Guild -  a group I'm in - had sent out five 2.5 inch strips to those who accepted the challenge to make blocks out of those strips.  Blocks in any multiple of 3 was acceptable - 3.5 inches, 6.5 inches, 9.5 inches or 12.5 inches.  I don't think I remembered to take a photo of the strips when they were uncut, but they included a yellow, a green, a blue, a red and a print strip.  

These were my blocks:

The finished kids' quilts for charity are going to be so-o-o-o cute!

What's Been in the Works

I have been busy doing a little cutting for one Quilts of Valor Mystery – the clues will be offered on Aug 12^th.  And I have been following the clues for a second QOV Mystery – clue 1 has been posted so far:

I have quilted two of the tops I brought back with me from my fun quilting retreat in Omaha:

Floral Wave

Butterfly Enchantment

And I did a little yardwork – not too much since it has been oppressively hot and humid here.

This is our typical forecast – the lightning chases me out of the sewing room each day:

mon	tue	wed	thu	fri	sat	sun
jul 17 Scattered Thunderstorms 90° 78°	jul 18 Thunderstorms 88° 77°	jul 19 Scattered Thunderstorms 91° 78°	jul 20 Scattered Thunderstorms 91° 78°	jul 21 Scattered Thunderstorms 90° 78°	jul 22 PM Thunderstorms 91° 79°	jul 23 AM Thunderstorms 91° 78°

And this is my latest kitchen gadget purchase.  So far, I love, love, love it.  I’ve made lots of chicken, beef roasts, and these pork chops:

Several things I really like about it are that it keeps the kitchen cooler since I am not using the hot oven and it makes putting an entire meal on the table much quicker.  The roast took 40 minutes rather than 3 hours.  That’s a win!

Two More Elephants

Still working on making a few elephants each month for the monthly Rainbow Scrap Color Challenge:

The one on the left is the last one from April's multi-color challenge and the one on the right is for May's green challenge.  The green one is feeling lucky because she has lots of lucky ladybugs!

I have quilted a few more for Sunshine On-line Quilters, but I need to have a Binding Blitz day to finish these up and get a box out.  Maybe this weekend ...

Panto is Arrowhead

Panto is Celtic Scroll

Panto is Mod Hearts

Auditioning for Multi-Color Madness

You may remember that I am sewing along with ScrapHappy’s Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  The colors have been Purple, Aqua, and Red for the first three months and the April color is Multi-Color!

This month will require me to undertake me a little auditioning from the old fabric stash.  Some of my previously made elephants have had a few extra colors, like this one:

 

But the background fabric makes this block *read* aqua.  My personal challenge is to find fabrics that don’t read a certain color, so the auditions begin:

The above were rejected because the first one definitely reads yellow and the second one reads green.  Out they go.

Now these are questionable:

 

They have lots of colors and the bugs are cute – that one might make the cut, but the rainbow beads might be hard to turn into elephants since the fabric is directional.

Now these are really getting on target.  This one will do nicely - looks like an elephant to me - lol:

And this one has lots of color and the black background is minimized – it’s a keeper:

This one is great!

But what to do with that directional fabric issue?  Might require some heavy brain work that I’m not up to right now.  It’s in the *let’s think about it* pile right now.

Look for some multi-color elephants later this week and see which fabric made the cut (oh, those sewing puns are endless – groan)!

And on a side note:  Can you believe I’ve had this box of fabrics for a few days and still haven’t opened it?!

It’s full of fabrics that will be used as backing for my children’s charity quilts.  The sale prices were good and I’m stocking up for when my quilting will be in demand after a retreat of the Sunshine On-line Quilt Guild in June.  We’re expecting to make over a hundred quilt tops – fun! 

And the Project Linus giant top is still on the frame - this is a photo before I loaded it up when I was trying to think up a quilting design.  I hope it gets finished soon - sigh.

Local Community Service Part 2

In yesterday’s post I told of how I had spent a great deal of time in March working on Quilts of Valor projects.  My Local Community Service also includes quilting for Project Linus.

I was given four tops to work up and two were giant-sized compared to the children’s tops that I usually receive – these were more adult lap-sized.   I had a terrible time with the first of those.  It had some kind of fabric for the borders and a part of the blocks that was not 100% cotton.

I’m not sure if it was silk, poly or a poly/cotton blend, but I could not work with it at all.  It took me three days to get 15 inches of horizontal quilting (12 inches tall).  That is not much!  The thread broke every 3 to 6 inches and no adjustment I made would fix it – and believe me, I tried everything.  They had given me a wonky backing that was cut from a wide back and there was not enough there for me to pull a thread or rip it to find the straight of grain.  The combo of the off-kilter grain and the odd fabric might have been pulling the needle just enough to continuously break the bobbin thread.  But to end this poor long story, I ripped out the quilting stitches and I’m giving the top back to the Project Linus group so they can give it to a more experienced quilter. 

I was able to get two smaller tops quilted up for them – I don’t usually make tops for them as my contribution is the quilting.  My piecing is usually dedicated to sewing and quilting for the Sunshine On-line Quilt Guild.  Here are the two Project Linus quilts:

Panto is Surf

Panto is Stars 'n Clouds

I have a third top from Project Linus that is still in progress.  It is a two-color top in a zig zag design and I’m not so sure I made a wise decision about the quilting panto.  We’ll see how it looks when it comes off of the frame … this one is too far along to get ripped out, so it will stay with what I picked out.  Sometimes I wish I could stop and practice some fancier quilting, but I guess I do OK with edge-to-edge pantos and I’m pretty happy to keep cranking out kid’s quilts!

Groundhog Day

It's official.

You-know-who has forecast 6 more weeks of winter. 

It's been cold off and on down here in West Central Florida, but that only serves to give us a few days to wear those clothes with the layered look that we like.  Today it is forecast to be sunny and back up to 76 degrees.  Not bad!

But last weekend was still cold and I kept inside to finish this quilt top from long ago.

It had been buried in the to-be-quilted basket for way too long.  One of my Sunshine On-line Quilt Guild members put it together at their Lake Tahoe retreat that I couldn't attend.  My contribution was quilting some of the 100+ tops that they made.  This is the last one to be finished.  It has such cute prints - they were looking at me while I quilted!

Today I'm working on a cat applique to add to a jelly roll top that I thought needed a little something to perk it up.  This is what I have so far:

A Lovely Package

Packages are fairly rare around here.  We are not big internet shoppers - although a few fabric sales have caught my eye in the past and my husband is getting entirely too savvy on Golfsmith and LostGolfBalls dot com sites - lol!

But I did receive this wonderful package today from a fellow Sunshine On-Line Quilt Guild member in New Jersey:

It was chock full of goodies:

my watch bear was enthusiastic!

Lots of extra fabric (think Backings) and fresh longarm needles and even a little extra surprise.  And lots of quilt tops that are now patiently waiting in line for that pesky longarmer to get on the stick!

I still have the below from my friends' retreat to quilt, so the above will have to wait a short while.

quilts at top of photo - backing at the bottom

And I was surprised this morning to see the robins stop by on their way South.  Some years we see them and some we don't.  They were very skittish so I didn't get good pictures, but I had to document their arrival (and departure soon thereafter):

My beloved dog is really not allowed in my sewing room on the second floor.  I have a baby gate in the stairwell to assure she stays out and doesn't get stuck with pins dropped onto my Berber carpet up there.  She has been scanned, pawed over and poked so much recently as they test for reasons why her liver enzymes are elevated, that I relented and let her up with me recently: She was fascinated by the view from the second story!  Too funny:

She had an all-day vet visit today to have a blood test every four hours - testing for Cushing's disease, an adrenol gland disorder that allows too much cortisol in her system.  We'll know the results next week.  Meanwhile, I'll sew and wait ...

Another Try at Scrappy

I have never made crumb blocks, but I was sent some from a fellow member of the Sunshine On-line Quilt Guild ( a group that makes donation quilts for children).  My first try at working with these blocks was a strippy quilt described at this post and shown below:

 

Digging into the box she sent again, I had some more of two sizes of blocks to work with.  So I decided to use the rectangle arrangement like the Boston Commons look with the smaller blocks in the center and the larger ones to make up the outside border:

There were cute square-in-a-square blocks with chili peppers in the center that had a dark blue background, so I used a dark blue for the stop borders.  I like that contrast.  Sometimes I use black fabric to make colors pop, but I like the richness of the navy in this one.  I might add one more border with colorful fabric or I might not.

 

Linking up later today to Quilting is more fun than Housework’s Oh Scrap!

 

And speaking of colors that pop, my neighbor has two orchids in her backyard that are blooming – these photos were taken at dusk but aren’t these still gorgeous despite the low light?!!