Finally finished Friday

Hi all! So, I had visions of getting a lot of quilting done this week while I was also busy doing actual work that people pay me to do. Guess how that worked out. Yeah. I must have been delusional or something. But I did finish up at least a few things that I can show you, so it was not a complete failure.

First of all, the Fiesta Pinwheels quilt (from June, for heaven's sake) is finally all quilted and bound!

Love it! This quilt comes pre-certified as cuddly. True story: I trimmed the quilt on the table (because who can crawl around on the floor anymore?), measured it, and left it folded on the sofa while I went up to make the binding. I came down to get it to sew the binding on, only to find that Mr. AQ was already using it.

Our conversation went something like this:

ME: Didn't you notice that the edges weren't finished yet?

HIM: Yeah, I wondered about that.

ME: Well, give it here and I'll go finish it and then you can have it back.
HIM: Can it wait until this inning is over?

Really.

Anyway, I really like how it turned out, and it now lives in our otherwise tastefully decorated family room. And I love the pictures from the park! Never took one there before, but you can bet I'll do it again. One guy gave me a funny look, but who cares? He's probably not a quilter or else he'd totally get it!

Another thing that I did was make up some more Drunkard's Path blocks and try out some layouts. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but there are so many options! (Marti Michell has a very helpful page with many layouts HERE.) Here is one very traditional option:

(Ignore the wrinkles--they all need to be pressed!)

A very cute option, which would have been absolutely fine if I hadn't tried switching the colors:

I like this better! This actually looks like a path through a garden or something. I would have started stitching these into blocks if I hadn't also found this layout:

Fabulous! So now I have no idea what to do. I want a traditional layout, which both of these are; I just can't decide which one fits the fabric better. Anyone with an opinion, help me out! Of course, I could make two quilts. . .which would be me getting carried away again. Thank goodness I don't have enough of this fabric for two quilts, or we all know what would happen!

And, last but absolutely not least, I got confused for a little bit about this month's colors for RSC14. For some reason I was thinking "brown AND black" and not "brown OR black." So I have these three more 9-patch blocks:

Oh, well--the more the merrier, I guess! Not sure that brown ruler fabric was a good choice, but it seems okay. We'll see when it's time to lay out the quilt, which is coming soon.

Everybody have a great weekend. I will be trying to make my way through the pile of things that need to be quilted up. The sewing room is getting to be too crowded with all of those unquilted projects laying around!

Linking up to Confessions of a Fabric Addict, crazy mom quilts, Vicki Welsh's Drunkard's Path Quilt Along, and SoScrappy. Be sure to stop by and wave hello to everyone!

Fiesta Friday

Fiesta Pinwheels is now a finished top! Check it out:

It's not scrappy, but it sure is yellow!

I love, love, love this quilt. It was so cheerful to work on, especially when I was assembling the final top and it was raining like crazy.  It was simple sewing, with big pieces and easy shapes. If I were in a real hurry and had some time, I could easily have finished the top in a weekend. The original quilt pattern was made in neutrals, but you could seriously make this in any colors and have it look fantastic.  As a commenter helpfully pointed out, it's the value that does all the work, while color gets the credit. I am seriously considering making another one with rainbow scraps. Because, you know, I don't have enough projects. (The initial post on this quilt is HERE.)

Here's one little tip I learned about batiks: if you like the fabric, buy a big enough piece to use in a project, a yard or more. I didn't have quite enough of the green, so I went back to get another piece. Turns out the color variations between bolts of batiks can be huge, even if they're the same color from the same manufacturer. I like the variation it gives across this quilt, but if things like that bother you, buy enough from one bolt so you won't need to get more that could be a lot different. So, that's my tip--spend more money.

Green variations in one block. See what I mean?

That was the big finish for this week, but I also found some more yellows to  make a couple more triangle blocks for RSC14:

The palest yellow there is a bit of a Kona solid called Butter. This is one of my favorites. I've used it for backgrounds in several quilts. I keep thinking it's a little too light for the triangle quilt, but every quilt needs variety, so I'm keeping it for now.

It has been raining here all week, so the photos are a little gray this week. I know as soon as I post this the sun will come out, so I'd best get to it!

Even the daylilies are tired of the rain!

Have a great weekend everyone! Hope you get to do something fun!

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts, the awesome Sarah, and So Scrappy!

Progress

Hello friends! Hope you are having some good quilting time already this week. Or at least shopping time! This weekend I checked out a new quilt shop near here. Quilt-agious is a very cute shop with some really nice fabrics. Plus she wants to start a Quilt of Valor chapter! So if you are anywhere near, go check it out.

Here's what I'm working on for this week:

Fiesta Pinwheel blocks! That will brighten anyone's day, won't it?  I certainly have been enjoying working on this very happy quilt. Hope to finish putting the blocks together by the end of the week! Exciting, no?

I am also working on making some fields and furrows blocks from my abandoned half-square triangles.

(What looks like a misalignment there is just a shadow. I checked!)

These are easy blocks, but I keep having to stop and check that I'm putting them together properly. Believe it or don't, I've never made fields and furrows before. Learn something new every day. Also, I was sure that I had at least 100 of these HSTs. Turns out I have more than 200, plus a bunch of left-over fabric. So I'll make 20 of these blocks and then see where I want to go from there.

Other than that, I've been making bindings. You know the big pieces of backing that are left after you have a quilt quilted? Like these big hunks:

I just cut those up into strips and make bindings. Usually I can get a bunch of 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 inch strips from these chunks.

 Then I have a nice basket o' bindings to use! Saves me a lot of time. If I have a 60 by 80 quilt, I can usually get at least 300 inches of binding from the backing scraps, which coincidentally is enough to bind a 60 by 80 quilt! Win, win.

Have a great week everyone!  Happy sewing!

Linking up with Connie and Lee and Let's Bee Social again. Come on over and get inspired!

Also, check out the blog roll! Some of the gadgets may FINALLY be working!I'll be adding more now that it works, so check back if you're looking for someone specific.

HST overload

Hello again! I am back from my conference, which was very good, and ready to hit the sewing room again. I came home to this:

The peonies are finally blooming! Happy dance!

I've learned not to take any sewing with me to conferences because I never have time to work on it and when I finally get back to the hotel room I'm exhausted, so I haven't sewn in a while. Let's see what kind of mischief we can get into today. . .

Half-square triangles have been all over quilting blogs recently, mostly because Vicki Welsh is hosting an HST quilt along over at Field Trips in Fiber. I happen to be the personal owner of literally hundreds (maybe a thousand) half-square triangles that I have saved from various projects. Let's pull some of them out, shall we?

First, I have these:

These are big leftover HSTs from the original Portugal quilt. (a picture of it is HERE) These are about 4 inches square, and I have 24 of them. No real clue what to do with them, but I should probably put them with these from the same fabrics:

Can you tell I really liked that fabric and didn't want to waste a single bit? I didn't bother pasting these up on the design wall because they are only 1 1/2 inches square. Plus, there are 384 of them. I am not making this up. 384. I'm going to have to really play around to put these two together.

Then there are these HSTs:

These are made from a couple of Fig Tree fabrics and were made from the cut-off parts of larger HSTs. (Clearly, I can't bear to throw away any usable fabric!) There are 69 of these babies, each of them currently measuring 2 inches. I kind of like the way they're pasted up here, so again, I'll play with that and see what I can come up with. I also think I can manage to scrounge up another couple of scraps of the same fabric to finish with an even number.

I also have 54 of these lovely 3 inch turquoise HSTs:

I like this layout! It looks like the beginning of a happy quilt.

There are also these HSTs, leftover from another project:

These are also 3 inch squares, and I have 32 of them. Potholders? I do love the broken dishes block.


Finally, there are these:

These are the result of a colossal mistake I made when attempting to make a quilt from a pattern. These are 2 1/2 inch HSTs, unfinished, which will make them 2 inches finished. I was supposed to make them 3 inches so that they finished at 2 1/2 inches. I think you can imagine what happened when I realized my mistake. They've been in a bag for a while. But just putting them up here on the wall makes me feel better, and I'm really liking the fields and furrows layout. There are plenty of these to make a nice quilt center, at least 100, probably more. Plus I have a bunch of the original fabric left to fill out the borders and such. We'll see how it comes together.

That's what I'll be playing with this week.  Well, in addition to this:

Could that be pieces of Fiesta Pinwheels ready to be made into blocks? It just might be!

Everybody have a great week, and come back Friday for another exciting episode! I'm pretty sure there will be a quilt finish to show off!

Linking up with Connie and Lee again, and the awesome Vicki Welsh. Come check out everyone's projects!

Fiesta pinwheels

It should not surprise anyone that it is raining here yet again. Just showers, not a storm, but I can't be the only one who's tired of it all. The good news is that it did not rain on commencement, so it was a great day for our graduates and their families. I end this school year grateful for my colleagues, my friends, and my students. I don't know how I got lucky enough to work at a job I love with people I really respect.

The rain has also made the garden EXPLODE, mostly with weeds, so we spent a bunch of time cutting grass, pulling weeds, seeding bare patches, and yanking out the tiny trees that have grown from chestnuts and such that the squirrels buried and forgot. It was a good, though tiring, weekend.

So now it's back to sewing! I am taking the rest of May to recover from the semester, so I will have some extra time to sew. (And clean. And maybe paint the family room.) I was looking around the sewing room this weekend (no, I wasn't cleaning! don't be silly!) and I pulled out this book:

This book is by Amy Ellis, who I just found out also blogs over at Amy's Creative Side. (I must be the last to know this.) This is a fantastic book! I love every pattern in here, in spite of my very mixed feelings about "modern" quilts. The quilts in this book are very creative and done mostly with simple shapes and easy sewing. No set-in seams or anything like that. I have a plan to make the cover quilt, but for now I am drawn to this one:

Digital pinwheels! A great pattern that will make a very nice quilt.

So. . .I love the patterns, but I am not much of a neutrals person. Making 30 beige and tan pinwheels would put me straight to sleep. So I dug out these fun fabrics:

Wow, that will wake you up, won't it? I have enough of the yellow for the background, and made some sample blocks to determine how to use the other colors. This is option 1:

Looks good! Here is option 2:

Hmmm. Could be a better picture, but I like the block. Option 3:

I like them all! I don't know if I can choose a color scheme; they're all so good. What if I put them all together?

Whoa. Party in the sewing room! About as far from neutrals as I can get, I think.

The yellow makes a great background color for this quilt. At first I was sure that I liked the turquoise center best, but now I'm leaning toward the red center. Or maybe all three colors together, because there are 30 blocks and that would allow for an even distribution of colors. I'm not sure! If you'd like to help me out, please leave me a comment.

I may not be sure about the exact color scheme, but I know that I'm planning to call this Fiesta Pinwheels. I think that name says it all. It kind of reminds me of Fiesta ware, the very colorful dishes that I wish I owned.

That's what I'm working on this week! Hope you are working on something festive as well!

Linking up with Judy at Patchwork Times and  Linky Tuesday and Show and tell Tuesday! Stop by and join the fun!