The stars at night

Hello everyone! I hope you are all feeling well and healthy, and that no one is going too stir crazy yet. This is a weird and challenging time, isn't it? It's like a slow-motion science fiction movie right now. Lots of stress and lots of strange things happening. Who ever thought we would live through a time when half our country is locked down? I hope you're all coping okay.

Well, I'll bet you can figure out my coping strategy! I've made myself a schedule since I'm teaching all online now and I want to be sure I get outside and eat enough and take breaks and such, and one thing on my schedule is "go to sewing room." Somehow I always find something to do there!  Here is what I've already finished up this week:

What? It's the completely finished and bound Constellations quilt! At long last! The sunshine is washing out the colors a bit, but it's finished and is bright and happy in spite of the dark background.

I made this quilt top as a quilt along project for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge in 2017. I know I'm way behind getting it quilted, but a little while ago I sent it off to Alycia, and she quilted some stars into it for me. Since I made the binding two years ago, it wasn't that hard to trim it up and put the binding on it, then de-stress by hand stitching the binding down.

This turned out to be a very cute lap size, as it's about 56 by 66.  I love this picture of the backing, mostly because it's a great color, but also because you can see the fun stars. The back looks almost as good as the front!

I like this little quilt, and I'm happy it's finished, but I'm not sure what's going to happen to it. Sometimes it's fun just to make something without a real plan. I'm sure that something will come up. Most likely one of my kids will make off with it. That seems to happen a lot around here.

I hope all of you are safe and are getting some stress-free stitching time. Or really stressed stitching time! Either way.  Stay healthy and take care of each other. We're going to come out of this, sooner or later, though I'm not sure things will ever be "the same" again. But they'll be better, I know that!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Brag about your Beauties, and Finished or not Friday.

Rainbows redux

In her post this week inviting people to participate in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for 2017, Angela asked veteran RSC quilters to post some of their finished rainbow quilts as encouragement to those of you who may be on the fence. Oooh, fun! I've made several RSC quilts from scraps. so consider this your encouragement! Except for the first one, these are in no particular order.

First up is this quilt, Odd Fellows:

This could be my favorite quilt ever, and that's saying a lot!  It lives in my living room and gets used and loved all the time. This is made entirely from scraps, including scrap white on whites.  I made a couple Odd Fellow's Chain blocks each month in the color of the month and then put them together at the end.  I just love how it came together, and how it turned out.  I think this quilt also involved the first tutorial I ever wrote, for the Odd Fellow's block.  (You can find that HERE.)

That same year I made this one, Triangle Surprise:

This was just half-square triangles in the color of the month put into 6 inch finished blocks.  At the end I set them on point and made a very simple quilt.  This one went to live at my daughter's house.

The Framed quilt was also an RSC quilt:

For this one I made crumb blocks for the centers of the stars, and then used the Moda Love pattern to make the frames around the stars.  These are also from leftovers, including the backgrounds, which used up a lot of my leftover white on whites (which I never seem to run out of.)  This one is on the guest bed at our house, because it's huge! But cozy!

Of course, there are a few others.  There's this one:

Sewing Lessons, made from scraps for the Classic Stitches BOM.  (Check out the tab at the top of the blog.)  This quilt also came from those tutorials:

Serendipity! Also all scraps! I think the hubs is napping under this one right now.  He really finds it comfortable for some reason. I think it's just the right size for him.

So that's some of the rainbow quilts I've made as a part of this challenge.  I'm sorry to say that I'm not done with last year's yet, but I'm working on them!  I also have plans for this year, including another BOM and a quilt using multiples of the same block. If you just make a few a month, it's not nearly as big a deal as if you sat down to make 30 copies of the same danged block at once.

Hope that's enough encouragement for you!  Come on along and join the fun.  It's nice here!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC17 (!!).