This way and that way

 Hello all! Well, that was a long and unexpected blogging break! Not to worry, I am fine. It was all for good reasons. My Dad and my sister came to visit, and when that happens, you drop everything and spend time with them. Which of course meant that I didn't finsih off any of the projects that I planned to before we had approximately 300 meetings. So I'm behind on everything, but this is pretty much my normal state, so it's all good!

 

We had a great time showing them around Baltimore and just hanging out, so no machine time for a couple weeks, but after they left I did finally manage to finish off the second Positivity top for the Positivity quilt along sponsored by our friends Preeti and Bernie:

I really meant to have both Positivity quilts quilted by now, but you can blame my Dad if you want. Or my sister, though she really deserves a medal for driving Dad all the way here.

Check out all those leaves on the ground! These are coming off the neighborhood trees because of all the heat this summer. It is odd and no fun. As you can tell, I did not follow the pattern exactly for this quilt either. I just have to be different, you know? If you look back at what Preeti now calls "the pot quilt" you'll see that I really never follow directions. I think this one turned out great, plus it used up a bunch of my fall-like scraps, too.

You may not be able to tell, but there is a lot of variety in those leaves. Anything I could get a 2-1/2 inch piece that was long enough and looked vaguely fall-like went into the top. There are a bunch od golds, some purples, various greens, and even a couple of turquoises. And I love the background fabric, too! It looks perfect with those scraps.

Because I rearranged the layout of the vines, my quilt is a little smaller, about 56 by 72. I think it's going to be a fine size, though, and I plan to send it along just the same. I think I'll quilt it in just straight lines going across. That will accent the vine movement, don't you think?

So, there we are! A second Positivity top, done before Labor Day. I can't believe the summer is over, can you? I just realized today is the first of September! Yikes!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Labor Day weekend! It's supposed to be 98 degrees here, so this would be a good weekend to clean up the mess that is my sewing room, but I'll probably just take a nap. The last few weeks have been fun, but exhausting! Did I mention that classes started, too? No wonder I'm tired!

Sharing at Finished or not Friday, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Brag About Your Beauties, the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique.

Positive progress

 Hi all! How are things going for you? I'm just hanging out, watching it rain and getting over that stupid embolism. I am feeling MUCH better, plus I'm glad to see the rain, even though it's been going on for a while now. Unbelievably, we still haven't made up for all the rain we didn't get for weeks, and we're still way below average for the year. It hardly seems possible given the amount of water that has fallen from the sky over the last week.

While I'm lazing around, I'm working on several projects, including this year's Positivity quilts, but first, here's one that I just recently started:

This is the very beginning of what will be a gift for the wedding of a friend and colleague. I love this center part because it's so hard to get gradations in yellows. I'm very proud of myself for this! It's not a hard pattern, so I'm hoping to have all the blocks made this week, so that I can get a longarm rental appointment and get this quilted up and sent off in time for the wedding at the end of July.

Then I have the two Positivity quilts. First are some of the blocks that have the green background:

I just love how these have turned out. You know how sometimes you get an idea in your head and you're not sure how it will work out? That's how I felt about these, but they are turning out okay.

And then I have the fall-themed Positivity quilt:

I have a bunch more of these blocks in pieces, but not together yet. The scrap thing is working out pretty well, though. I'm liking the half-drop in this layout, too, so that might make its way into the finished quilt.

So that's what I'm up to, other than re-doing some travel plans. I can't fly for a while, so it looks like we'll be driving to various places around the country. Not California, though! Still too far for me to drive. Hope things are going well for you. We're expecting more smoke from wildfires, so that will be fun, won't it? I understand it was quite smoky in the Midwest over the last few days, so believe me, we feel your pain. Ick.

Enjoy the rest of the week!

Sharing at Midweek Makers and Wednesday Wait Loss.

Fall color amid winter gray

 Hi everyone, and happy weekend! Hope you have had a really good week. I finished getting ready for the new semester this week, and I'm feeling pretty proud of myself for it. And hey, did you notice that I redecorated? Some of the settings have changed since last time I did this, and I'm not sure what they all do, but I managed to get a nice pretty picture up at the top, and that's what matters, right?

I finished up another quilt top this week in between class prep, and before I show it to you, you'll have to cast your mind back to last fall, which is when this quilt top really should have been finished. But it wasn't, so just try to remember the pretty leaves and how awesome they were. And didn't it smell great?

 

 

Doesn't that seem like a quilt top fit for fall? It certainly looks good and colorful against all the gray in the landscape these days. I know there really weren't any pink leaves, but it needed a little zing, so I threw in some pink scraps, too. I started putting this together last fall, and it's been hanging around here for way too long, just taking up a big space on the design wall. This is the Sunshine pattern by Myra at Busy Hands Quilts, and you can get the pattern right HERE.

 

This quilt was pretty easy, except that I made it hard. It made my brain confused, and it's my own fault. You can see that it is mainly squares and half square triangles, and the pattern shows the quilt made in scraps of just two colors. This would have been so much easier! I decided to use up a number of orange scraps that I had left over from my nephew's quilt, and I threw in a bunch of other scraps that looked like fall leaves, with the second color coming from some golds that a friend gave me. 

 

This was not my best idea ever. Sure, it turned out looking great, but the road there was arduous. I kept turning the hsts in the wrong direction, and putting the wrong color in the wrong place, and then I also had to be sure not to put the same color too close to another piece with same color, you know? For some reason, I just couldn't make sense of how it should go. If you can see the pinwheels in the top, I kept stumbling over those and putting them in the wrong place. This was entirely my own fault for trying to be creative with a pattern I didn't create myself.

I sat down this week and made myself figure it out, and it did turn out well, I think. Look at all the variety in those scraps! (Of course there's a stray thread, too, because I couldn't make something that's not covered in thread. I always think I get them all, but there are always more.) If you decide to make this quilt, I highly recommend putting it together in columns. That would be so much easier than rows! Plus I think it might be easier to get into a rhythm and spot mistakes, too.

This quilt top finished up at about 56 by 72, a nice lap size. I'm pretty sure it's going to become a donation quilt, but it will have to wait its turn to get quilted up because there are several things in line ahead of it. I just ordered a bunch of backings, so I'm pretty excited to get some more things quilted up and moved out.

So there we are-- off the design wall and ready to finish! It was a long road, but it feels good to have gotten this far. Hope you have gotten pretty far along on a project or two as well. And if you know what "custom robot tags" are in Blogger, and what I should do with them, be sure to let me know! This weekend I'm planning to stitch some leftover battings together because the weather looks nasty, and I hope you all have something more fun planned than that! Have a great weekend!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or not Friday, Brag About Your Beauties, and the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique.

Rising from the leaves

 Hi everyone, and happy weekend! Well, we seem to have made it through yet another week. Every week I'm surprised when Friday comes, but I'm always glad to see it. Our weather here has been up and down, but the one thing that is very evident is that the days are definitely getting shorter. I saw a cartoon this week where a woman is panicky because she thinks it's midnight, but it turns out that it's only 5:30. It doesn't sound funny when I describe, but I definitely chuckled in recognition.

This has been a hard week, but I did manage to finish the Phoenix quilt top! Here it is, out among the fall leaves:

 

It's pretty, isn't it? You can see that we still have a lot of green, but we've also had some leaves falling. Not a lot of pretty colors on our property yet, but there are some around here. I don't really remember last fall, but I really miss the beautiful maple we had in Wisconsin. It always turned such a pretty red-orange.

 

Back to the quilt! This is the Phoenix quilt, a pattern from Sharon Holland that you can get HERE. It was a super-easy quilt to put together. The most time consuming part of it was trimming the hsts, which was strangely peaceful since life is so stressful for me right now. I also had to keep referring back to the layout diagram because I couldn't keep it all straight, but that's probably just me. I kept thinking the blocks were rectangular because of the design they create, but they're actually square, which kind of confused my brain.

 

I made one smallish change to the pattern and used different scrap pieces to make the centers of the flowers instead of what the directions called for. I like how it turned out and added more colors to the quilt. I also thought about adding a row and making the quilt bigger, but in the end I decided that I didn't need a bed-size quilt right now, and I really liked the mix of colors that I already had. Adding a row, though, would be really easy and make this a twin quilt. 

I'm thrilled with this finish and would absolutely make it again. Just a single block would make a nice sized wall hanging, and four of them would be a nice table topper. Next time, though, I would choose a stronger fabric for the corners. I used a pale yellow this time and it's pretty hard to see in the actual quilt. I had such a nice time making this quilt that I also purchased another Sharon Holland pattern, for the Saguaro quilt, and I'm putting that on this list for after the next quilt that I've been cutting out.

So there we are! I hope all of you are staying well and healthy, and that you have something relaxing planned for this weekend. My plan is to try to get a nice nap. They've started putting the siding up on the new garage, and they start early in the morning. But they don't work Saturdays, and I won't be working this Saturday, either!

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

Autumn abounds

 Hi everyone! So, just like that, it's October. How on earth did that happen? While 2020 cannot be over soon enough for me, the year is just rushing by now. I guess this means that it's really fall, too, and the next season will be here before too long. With the pandemic and all, can't we just skip that and go right to next spring? That only seems fair.

I have another finish to share today! The closet full o' tops is slowly getting whittled down to just a few. Here is this week's finish:

 

Artsy, and remarkably seasonally appropriate! This is a fall flowers quilt that I made in 2018 with a bundle that I curated for Bernie's shop. Some of the fabrics are still available there, although the bundle itself is sold out. (I would hope so, since it was two years ago, after all!)

As you can see, the sunshine from this morning made getting a whole picture a little challenging. I don't care, because I am loving the sun. I looked back at the original post of the finished top, and it appears that the sunshine was an issue there, too. This little quilt apparently loves the sun!

 

 

I did have this quilted with a leaf pattern, which is fairly loose and makes it feel like the leaves are blowing across the top. This was quilted by my friend Diane, who always does a wonderful job and would do so for you, too, if you'd like.

 

There is no real pattern for this quilt, but you can find patterns for the individual blocks under the Intricate Stitches tab above. I remember challenging myself to use the whole bundle, and I did only have a few scraps, but I liked some of the fabrics so much that I ordered more of them. You can see at least two in my Phoenix quilt blocks, for example. It's not like I have a closet full of other fabric to use or anything. . .but that's a subject for another time!

The only thing I am not really sure of with this quilt is the binding. I was going to go for pink, but it didn't look right, and I didn't want another beige, so I went with a dark green that has some pink and gold in it. I'm not sure I like it in the finished quilt, but there's no way I'm going to redo it.

So, there is another quilt finished! I feel very virtuous. And warm and cozy because-- quilt!  Hope you all have a lovely autumn weekend. Right now there are carpenters making loud banging noises and cutting a new door from the garage to the house. Ordinarily, I would just go somewhere else with wifi, but the pandemic kind of has us all trapped, so maybe I'll just go for a walk. I might need a cookie first, though!

 

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Brag About Your Beauties, and Finished or Not Friday.

Leaves of fabric

Hi everyone!  How was your week?  Mine was very, very busy, but now the sewing room is painted.  Yay!  Today I am planning to put up the design wall in there, and maybe, if I am very ambitious, put together the new storage unit.  After that the boxes get emptied!  I probably won't be that ambitious until next weekend, but you have to have goals, right?

You may have noticed that it is no longer summer; it has actually become autumn.  You may have missed this because the temperatures are still in the 80s and 90s, but really--it's fall.  It happens that I love the fall, maybe because my birthday is the first day of autumn.  Really!  So today I wanted to show off some great fall-themed fabric I recently got for a special project coming up at the end of October: 

Don't those look yummy?  Don't know why this looks like night time, because it wasn't, but those fabrics shine anyway.  These are from the Into the Woods line from Paint Brush Studios, which is a sponsor of this special project.

The camera doesn't really capture how pretty these fabrics are.  The leaf print on top has very rich colors and I wish I had gotten more of it.  The others are also really rich and remind me a lot of the colors we'll soon be seeing on the leaves if it ever cools down.

These are great fabrics, but for my project I also added in a few of the Paint Brush solids, just to add a little dash of spice:

This is the print I'm going to use the most of, along with the solids.  Two golds and a purple!  Purple adds so much to fall prints and quilts, although many lines of fall fabric leave out purple.  Most leaves don't turn purple, but check out how the purple mums enhance the yellow and maroon ones:

Okay, the maroon ones aren't quite open yet, but don't the purple, yellow, and green look nice together?  These are on my new deck and are making me insanely happy.  I have flowers again!

So that's the sneak peek at an upcoming project!  Look for the completion of this coming up the week of October 24th. There are some other people involved too, and I've heard a rumor that there *may* be some giveaways. Everybody loves those, right? 

Hope you're all getting in some fun stitching and getting to pet some pretty fabric.  If we all make things from fall prints, will the weather get the hint?

Sharing at Sunday Stash with Molli Sparkles.