Summer florals

Hi all!  Is it unbearably hot at your house? Right now my handy dandy weather station says that it's 96 degrees. That's a bit extreme, don't you think? It's supposed to rain tomorrow and break the heat, and for once I'll be thrilled to see rain around here.  In our ongoing housing saga, we think we've found another house. Hurray! Send all your good thoughts that they accept our offer.  Every finger I have is crossed!

So, if you remember, I somehow packed my favorite quarter inch foot when I was packing up the sewing room.  That was a dumb move! I finally gave in and bought a new one, and then I had to test it out to be sure I liked the seam it gave.  Everyone has to do that, right?  Well, one thing led to another and I ended up with this:

That's a lovely little test piece, don't you think?  Obviously I had a lot of sewing mojo built up because I just kept stitching, and it was such a joy. 

This took just a couple of afternoons when no one was scheduled to tour the house.  I admit that I didn't draw lines on all of those little squares, so some of the corners are a little bit "organic."  I love them anyway, and we all know that real flowers aren't perfect, so I refuse to let myself feel bad about it at all.

This whole piece is made from scraps. For the flowers, I sorted through my box of 2-1/2 inch squares and just chose the first nine that had four matching squares.  The leaves all came from the 2-1/2 inch squares box, too. The flower centers came from the 1-1/2 inch square box, though they had to be trimmed down just a bit. The lavender sashing was in the string jar, which is sitting out and acting decorative in one of the bedrooms.

I actually had a pattern for this, though I didn't really need it once I got going.  It's from Quilt Sampler magazine from. . . Spring 2012.  Yeah, it took that long.  But it was worth the wait!

I plan to quilt this up and use it on the table just as soon as there is time to set up the machine for an hour or two again. It looks great already, but I think it will look even better with a simple crosshatch.  I think I have a scrap binding that's big enough if I can locate the ziplock bag I put those in. Pretty sure I know where it is, though, which is a good thing because I don't know where half my clothes are right now.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend that is nice and cool.  We will have all of our fingers crossed, plus we have three showings and then an open house, so we'll be busy.  Send many good thoughts!

It's still Friday, so I'm sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or not Friday, as well as Alycia's TGIFF and Cynthia's Oh Scrap!

Fresh block piecing

Hi everyone, and happy summer! How are things going for you?  Our housing saga continues. We thought we had found a house but it did not work out.  The search goes on.  We're coming up to a deadline, though, and it's a hard deadline, because we have to move before school starts, so we will find something else this week.  Somehow it seems harder to move now than it did to move across the country.  And real estate, which is weird to begin with, is really weird here. Lots of odd rules to get used to.

In spite of the drama around here, this past week I actually managed to sew some blocks! It's been an experience with my stitching stuff stashed everywhere and needing to be put away the second I'm done with it, but I finally figured out that I could fit in a few minutes of cutting without too much mess, and then stitch up what I had cut when I had a few minutes longer.  It worked!  Here are the blocks I made the past few days:

Oh, gosh, those make my heart happy! These are 6-inch blocks for my old and new sampler quilt.  It happens that these are all blocks from Tula Pink's sampler book.  I decided to work through those before I tackle the more traditional blocks.  If you recall, for this sampler I'm making 48 blocks that each finish at 6 inches.  Half are the more modern blocks from Tula Pink, and the other half are traditional blocks, many with lots of pieces.  The Tula blocks have fewer pieces and are much simpler to put together, which certainly suits my life right now.

I cut these blocks in some quick moments and stored them in sandwich bags until I could stitch them.  Here's a tip-- be sure to label your sandwich bags! I spent way too much time trying to remember which cut pieces went with each block.  By the way, don't those flowers look great?  They are a spot of sunshine for me.  I only planted pots this year so I could take them with me when we leave.  ~Sigh~ I really do love flowers.

Anyway, I now have 17 of the 48 blocks finished:

I love them all!  It's kind of funny to see how alike they are, and yet so different.  When the whole thing is together I don't know if it will be really apparent which blocks are Tula blocks and which are more traditional. Or maybe it will be super easy-- we'll see! Stay tuned!

Hope you all are having a good week.  Last week, in addition to house drama, I had a part of the orientation for my new job and got the keys to my new office.  This week I'll be moving books and such into the new place and trying to get things set up.  This is very exciting! I really can't wait to get to work in the new place.  Not really looking forward to moving all those boxes, but it kind of goes with the territory.  Keep your fingers crossed that it goes well!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

Down memory lane

Hello, friends!  Long time no see! What can I say?  Life happens.  It has been a jam-packed couple of weeks. I went to my usual conference and participated in a panel presentation, which was fun and interesting, but exhausting.  The conference was in Pittsburgh this year, and let me tell you-- Pittsburgh is a beautiful city! We didn't get a lot of time to explore, but I would definitely go back. After the conference we went to visit the grandchildren, and that was pure bliss.  My oldest grandson kept calling me "honey," and they were all just a joy.

On the home front, I've been trying to sew, but literally every time I pull out the machine, someone wants to look at the house.  This is great, but frustrating! We think we may have found a house in Baltimore, too, if someone else hasn't bought it before this publishes.  The housing market is crazy!  We've scheduled times to look at houses, only to get canceled because someone bought it before we could get there.  I guess we'll know pretty soon, though!

Since I haven't been sewing, how about a trip down memory lane instead? I have a few pre-blogging quilts that I've never talked about and they're feeling neglected, so how about a good look at this one:

Wow, that's a lot of color! It's really a lot, because this quilt is huge-- 74 by 96. I'm pretty sure that was the biggest quilt I had made at that point.

I made this quilt in 2006 for my daughter to take to college.  She was very involved and helped choose the fabrics and the backing.  You can tell she's my kid, because I think there are 52 different fabrics in the blocks, plus the background, backing, and sashing, and all of them are colorful.  Most I wouldn't have chosen, but they work great here.

This quilt taught me so much.  It's from a pattern in Quiltmaker magazine (sorry that I didn't keep the pattern so I can't even tell you when it was published, but I think it was 2005) and is the first quilt that I fully paper pieced.  I think I had made a wall hanging size quilt to learn paper piecing, but the blocks here were all paper pieced.  I remember tracing the pattern onto a lightweight paper instead of using a copier, and there are 48 blocks, so you know that took forever.  It certainly did teach me paper piecing, though!

This quilt also taught me to measure twice.  It happens that I cut every single piece of the sashing half an inch too short.  10-inch blocks, 10-inch sashing, right?  I cried when I realized my mistake, but then I just cut more, which means that I had pieces of that pink hanging around here for years.  There's probably still some somewhere.

This might be the first quilt I had long armed, too.  It was such a behemoth that there was no way that I could even think of quilting it.  It's also quite heavy, but she went to college in Wisconsin and lived in the dorm, so it worked out! I certainly got no complaints that it was too warm.

I've been storing this for awhile, so now it's going back to live at my daughter's house.  We've talked a bit about cutting into two smaller quilts (horrors!) and that may happen someday if she has more kids.  I'd love to see grandchildren playing with the quilt.  It would make two perfect kid quilts, don't you think?

All this time later, I still love this quilt. It was way outside my comfort zone at the time, and I would do so much differently now (use a copier, for one), but it's still great. And my daughter still loves it, so that's a win all around.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer.  I'm going to try to pull out the machine this week and get some things done.  If someone buys the house, that would be better because I could make a mess again, so send all your good vibes! I'll be back sooner rather than later!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Finished or Not Friday.