Catching up

Hi all! How have you been? I've been having quite a life.  So much to do, so little time. You know what I mean?

I must have something like 70 or 80 projects in progress (I exaggerate. . .but only a little), but I've really been wanting to catch up on some of my rainbow scrap challenge projects. I put away the Boston Common quilt in progress before we moved, and I've pulled it out to add the last rounds to it. Now that we have all the colors, I thought I could finish it right up. Here's how far I got:

I love the aquas, and the next color is orange. I have a whole bunch of oranges left over, but I can't decide if I want the orange next to the aqua--which is a pretty combination-- or if I want a round of white between them.  What do you think?

Right now I'm leaning towards the white. Dark blue follows the orange, but I know I can't do that, so I'm not sure what will happen there. I know I have a lot of pink and purple, though, so those should be easy enough.

I also started finishing up the string sections for the rainbow scrap happy rails quilt:

I've since finished off the aquas, which look really happy, and started on the oranges. I think it's going to look great once I find a fabric for the centers. And you can see that I still do like skinny strings. I just can't throw those little bits away! It's an illness, really. Making the string sections is very calming because they require almost no thought, just feeding through the machine.  Heaven knows I could use some calming right now, so I'm having a good time with them.

That's pretty much all the stitching I've done! Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who had written all her posts six weeks in advance, but we work in real time around here.  Hope you have had some time to get some stitches in!

Red squares and strings

Hi everyone! It has been a very busy week here, though we are still waiting for the arrival of our new granddaughter, so I'm just popping by today to share the start of two more rainbow scrap challenge projects. I got to work on these a little this week, but didn't have time for much else. If you recall, one of my RSC projects is the cut glass dish blocks, but I have two others I'll be working on this year as well.

Today's post has to start with this photo of some lovely flowers, because all the rest of the photos today are extremely boring:

I needed some spring this week, so I stopped and got myself some flowers. Carnations from the grocery store, not a florist, but still lovely.  They certainly have brightened the place up and made me just a bit happier amidst all the gray here in January.

One of my RSC projects for this year will be a Boston Common quilt.  Boston Common is a lot like Trip Around the  World, but it starts with a rectangular center, not a square.  Here's my beginning:

I told you the pictures were boring! As I've said before, I save squares in three small sizes, and I'm going to make the Boston Common quilt from the 2-1/2 inch squares.  Even with last year's Squared Away project, I still have tons of these squares.  The plan is to make a "round" every month, with a white round thrown in when necessary.  I added the whites here because I think the red is likely to conflict with whatever color comes next.  This wasn't all of my red squares, but it was close!

My last RSC project for the year involves strings.  Apparently it's the year of the string quilt, because they are everywhere!  My plan is to make a Scrap Happy Rails quilt from Amanda Jean Nyberg's book No Scrap Left Behind.  I made one of these last year and it was super easy and turned out great.  Here are my red string sections:

Another dull photo! String quilts are so appealing because every fabric will work for them.  Funny story-- last year I cleaned out all of my old scraps, so this year I had no red to work with (I do have just about every other color, though.)  I asked friends for some red strings, and they were all very generous, so almost none of the strings in these sections is from my own fabric.  They still look great, though, don't they?  I have a lot of strings left over, so I'll have to think of a project to use those up, too.  I'm thinking donation quilt.

Those are my starts on the two remaining projects! They'll look a lot more exciting as we go along and add to them, I think.  I did one more RSC-related thing this week, though it isn't red:

This is the kitten block from Tiny Tuesday.  Isn't it adorable?  I could see a whole litter of these, in many colors.  It happens that my daughter has a gray cat, so of course my cat has to be gray.  (She also has a white cat, but that would not have worked so well.)  I'm weighing doing this quilt, too.  The blocks will be fast and we all know tiny things are so cute, even in geometrics.

We are expecting a nasty weekend with rain and snow, and then a deep freeze and ice.  Sounds like a good time to make progress on some quilty projects! Hope you all stay warm and get some stitching time too.  Stay in the sewing room with all that nice cozy fabric!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC19.