First flowers of spring

 Hi everyone, and welcome to the weekend spring begins-- hurray! It's been a long winter, and I am glad to see the end of it. At least I hope we've seen the end. Winter never seems to want to leave, and could still surpise us once or twice. But check out what is blooming on our hillside:

Yes, it's first daffodil of spring, and I am very, very happy to see it! And here's something else I'm happy to see-- a finished quilt:

There's a chance that this quilt has been done for a little while and was waiting for a binding, but that's not really relevant, is it? This is a quilt I called Cactus Flower, and was a pattern by Sharon Holland called Saguaro. I made this as a part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge last year. Unbelievably, I finished it last October and now it is a cozy finished quilt!

I really love how this turned out. It looks much better than expected, though it is really different from Sharon Holland's cover quilt. This quilt is all scraps and looks like flowers to me. I do love flowers, you know. It's quilted with Omni thread in a color called Cheesecake, and I'm telling you this because I now want to quilt every quilt with this color! It looked really yellow on the cone, but it blended really well with every color in the quilt. I really do want to use it for everything.

I long armed this quilt with a panto I got from a friend. It's called Loose Leaf from Urban Elements and I have had many quilts finished with this pattern. It always looks great, but there's a twist with this one. My friend wanted the pattern to be a different size, so she ordered it to be 10 inches, thinking that she would get it printed with two 5-inch rows. Well, no. She got one 10-inch row. So this is Loose Leaf in a really big size. But it went really fast and made the quilt nice and cozy!

The backing here is a neutral piece that I got somewhere and used up on this quilt. It's not exciting, but you can see the quilting nicely. I dithered on the binding, but then I just bound it in the same fabric as the border. It makes a nice frame and isn't distracting from the quilt's flowers.

This quilt finished at just about 65 by 65, and I'm donating it to Mercyful quilts for the Hands 2 Help Challenge. I really enjoyed making it, and it finished off light and soft, and I think someone would really find comfort in it. Everyone deserves beauty and comfort, especially at the end of life.

 

And that's the story of this quilt! Next week is spring break for me (happy dance!) and I have a longarming appointment to finish off the quilt that met with disaster from the messed up tension last month. It took forever to pick out all that bad quilting, and even longer to get all the stupid little bits of thread out of the quilt, but I think I should be able to finish it off this time. And I have another one I hope to finish, too. Just a ton of things happening, and those machines will be churning away!

Everyone have a great weekend. Hope you have warm breezes and some happy flowers coming up where you are, too! And just a note that Hands2Help signups start Sunday, so be sure to come back then!

Look at all those daffodils coming up!

Sharing at Finished or not Friday, Brag About Your Beauties, soscrappy for RSC22, and the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique.

Cactus Flower in the rain

 Hello all! So, I tried and tried and tried to get pictures of today's quilt so that I could post it on Friday, but would the weather cooperate? No, it would not. It has been raining for days, and yesterday was incredibly wet. It just would not stop, and it's still drippy and gloomy this morning. Nothing you want to take a quilt outside in. Some coastal areas in Maryland flooded, and you should have seen the little stream at the back of our property. It turned into a lake!

 

So, I didn't get pictures until just now, and they're damp. Ah, well, it's still a good-looking quilt top, however damp it is:

 

 

Hurray, it's a picture! This is the completed top made from the Saguaro blocks (pattern HERE) that I've been working on for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at soscrappy, and I am so, so happy to have it finished. This means that I have finished off two whole quilt tops from the RSC this year!

You might notice that this top does not contain all of the colors in the RSC. Here's the thing-- I pulled the blocks out and put them up on the wall, fully intending to make some orange blocks and then maybe a few others to fill out the quilt top, and then suddenly, I just didn't want to. I love stitching, and I love when a quilt is finished, but I just didn't want to make any more blocks. Do you ever feel that way? I think it turned out well even without a few of the colors, and I like the overall vibe.

Anyway, I counted and I had 25 blocks, which would make a nice quilt in a good size. I don't really go for square quilts, but I didn't want to either make more blocks or leave one out, so a square quilt it was. This finished at just about 66 by 66, which is bigger than I thought it would be, so I'm happy. And really, does this look like a rainbow quilt?

 

 

One pattern change that I made was to add some more of my scraps to the big blank areas. Putting the blocks together left big empty white spaces, so I used some of my prints-on-white scraps to make stitch and flip corners that came together in the centers. This broke up the big spaces and used more scraps. Hurray for that, because I never know what to do with those prints.

 

 

The pattern doesn't call for a border, but I felt that the quilt looked unfinished without one, so I auditioned a bunch of different fabrics and landed on this one. Are you surprised? I was! I would not have picked this in a hundred years, but I think it looks great with this quilt, kind of like a frame.

So, one more quilt top in the win column! I finished two RSC quilt tops this year, and I feel like that's a good RSC year. I still have far too many scraps, but I do have a plan for next year, and it involves very complex calculations, lots of math, and drawings. . .just kidding, of course! Still thinking about next year.

I admit I took this picture just to show the trees in the background. It's raining, but that makes them look so good!

Everyone have a wonderful weekend! I hope it is drier where you are than where I am! 

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC21, and also Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and the Patchwork and Quilts linkup on Sunday.

Just three more

 Hi everyone! It's the last weekend before school starts for me, and I'm nervous as all get out. We had a ton of meetings this week (ugh) and by the time the last one was finished there were students on campus. Actual living students, right there on campus! It was thrilling, like the campus is alive again. We require vaccines and we all have to wear masks, but I still don't know whether to be happy or terrified about going to class. What a strange world this has become.

Thankfully, the sewing room remains its messy self. I've come to believe that the one constant in life is scraps. They never really go away, and the more you use, the more you make. In that vein, I've made three more Saguaro blocks for the RSC this week:

 

 

All of those meetings meant not a lot of stitching time, but I'm glad I was able to eke these out. I love aqua and turquoise, and choosing the fabrics for these was kind of hard. I think I made decent choices, though. 

I counted all of the blocks that I've already finished, and I have 22, including the new aqua ones. I can either make three more and have a square quilt that is at least 60 by 60, or make eight more and have a quilt that's at least 60 by 72. I'm pretty much ready to be done, so I think I'll just make three more, whenever we get to orange. (I know I could just make two more and have a quilt that's 4 blocks by 6 blocks, but that's 48 by 72, a bit long and skinny for me.)

 

I didn't do any other stitching on the RSC projects, but I did have a little retail therapy arrive, in the form of some wide back fabrics, shown above. Look at the size of those dots! That was a real surprise, though overall the fabric is really pretty. I'll find something to use it on, though it won't be a small project. Speaking of retail therapy, don't forget to hop over to Bernie's shop for her retirement sale, where the fabric is now 30% off. Still a lot of bargains!

Hope you all are having a good weekend! Enjoy these last few days before school, because after that comes fall. Maybe it will cool off by then!

 

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC21.

Rainy and red

 Hello all, and a good Memorial Day weekend to you! It's very damp here and smells a bit musty because it's been raining quite a bit, but I'm happy to see the weekend arrive. I've just about completed my transition to summer mode, where I work on stuff until I get bored, then move on to something else-- and no one cares or tells me I should finish something else. It's pretty great, and it comes with more sleep.

One of the things that I worked on this week was my quest to catch up with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge by making red blocks. These are the blocks for the quilt I am making from Sharon Holland's Saguaro pattern, which is really well suited to the RSC. Here are my red blocks:

 

 

It is very wet here today! It's been raining for days, which is okay because we really need it. As you may remember, I don't have a lot of red, and what I do have doesn't get used very often. It's just not my color. I only have these scraps because I've been cutting for another quilt, though I do have some scraps of darker reds. These are brighter and happier reds, though, and I like them for this quilt. 

 

 

A few months ago the RSC color was the darker end of the green spectrum, but as you can see, I'm using greens for "leaves" on each of the blocks because it seemed like a good idea when I started. To fill in for the darker greens, I made some blocks using black prints:

 

 

I admit this is an out of the box choice, but just look at those blocks. I think they turned out amazingly well. Look at the cute strawberry block! I was unsure about these, and then after I made them I wanted to ditch all the other blocks and finish making the quilt with all black prints. I didn't do that of course, but it was tempting.

 

 

I wish I could say that I caught up on all the rest of the RSC projects, but I haven't yet. I'm finishing off the last of the Hands to Help donation quilts, and then tomorrow starts Preeti's Positivity Quilt Along, and I'm still working on the Edyta Sitar quilt, which is going pretty quickly. Pretty sure those scraps in the bins will wait for me.

Hope you all have a good start-of-summer weekend and Memorial Day on Monday. In addition to stitching a few things, I'll be dodging some raindrops and putting in the plants at long last. I'm ready for flowers, how about you? 

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC21.