Framed in

Hi everyone!  I hope your week is going well!  As you read this, we are actually moving at long last.  It's amazing, but a lot of work.

While my sewing room is disassembled, I thought I'd share some beauty shots of the Framed quilt, which is now all quilted and finished:

It turned out so great!  Hard to get a picture of the whole thing because it's so big! (About 87 by 103.) For those who don't know, Framed was one of my projects for last year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  It was quilted by Alycia, who did an amazing job. (Email her and maybe she'll quilt one for you too!)  So much great texture on this one. 

I used this batting in the summer weight, which is so soft and turned out really well.  (I bought this when we were in Maine, so I don't know how easy it is to get anywhere else.)  I think the thinner batting kept the quilt from getting too heavy.

This quilt has a scrappy binding, which I almost never do, but should do more often.  You know how something always gets broken when you move?  Well:

Yep, I broke the jar where I keep the leftover bits of binding.  Nothing to do but use them, right?  They're already cut and just need to be seamed together, so why not?  I'm sad to tell you that I had enough binding pieces here for at least 3 quilts.

I love how this binding came out!  I don't usually do the "rolled quilt" picture, but this shows off the binding really nicely.  Yep, there were some short pieces in there, but I like them!  And it used them up, so it's a win all around.

Framed is destined for the bed in the guest room, since it will fit and will be nice to sleep under.  I confess that I spent a little time snuggled under it and can certify it as extra cozy.

As I said, the moving truck is coming!  Keep your fingers crossed for us, and I'll see you soon from the new sewing room!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finish it Up Friday, and Finished or Not Friday.   (If we have Internet by then--who can tell?)

I've been Framed!

Hi everyone! (waving wildly)  I have some new construction to show off today. "New construction" as in a finished "house"--  I've finished the Framed quilt top at last! I was really determined to get this out of the project box and ready to quilt up.  It's waited long enough. Here is the finished product:

Happy dancing over this way!  I am calling this quilt Framed, as I have for a while now, because really--what else could I call it?  This was one of my projects for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge last year.  The centers of the stars are crumbs, and the stars are set in larger frames made of different fabrics in the same color.  Almost everything in this quilt was a scrap or a leftover hunk, including the white-on-whites.  The only "new" fabric is the orange frame, which I cut out of a larger piece I haven't used yet, and one yard of a single white-on-white for the border (such as it is.)  Even those pieces came from my stash.

Wrinkled but finished!

This quilt is huge, which made it a real challenge to get good pictures of the whole thing.  The blocks are 24 by 24 each, which in retrospect I should have figured would make a really big quilt.  But we all know that I have trouble envisioning the sizes of things from the patterns, so I didn't really think it would be this big.  It's currently 78 by 102.  Yikes! The one thing I might do differently if I were to make it again is use a very narrow sashing between the blocks.  Matching all those points was not my favorite thing.

Given the size of the center, the only border that I added was a 3-inch strip of white all around. This mainly functions to stabilize all the edges and just softly frames out the piecing.  It really didn't need anything else.  This was made from the Moda Love pattern, available for free HERE.  If you scroll down, you can see that the pattern is offered in different sizes.  Mine is officially the "charm square" size.  A few of the layer cake size would cover a king-sized bed!  I would totally make this again, and I might just try the smallest size, which would finish at literally half the size of this quilt.

I am so happy to have this done!  It took me too long, I know, but I'm glad it's finished.  The backing will be my  remaining piece of extra-wide fabric from Amanda Jean Nyberg's Good Neighbors line--also a leftover! (The fabric for the orange frame is also Good Neighbors fabric.)

This is the Independence Day weekend in the US, so I hope everyone has a great celebration!  We are going house-hunting for the 800th time, then have some more fun things planned.  Enjoy the fireworks!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, crazymomquilts, and soscrappy for RSC16!  And since this is all scraps, also Oh Scrap! on Sunday.

Framing work

It's a beautiful day today!  I got back from my conference so inspired and ready to work on new things.  You know how you go to a quilt show and see so many pretty things and just can't wait to get home again and start sewing?  That's how I feel after conferences.  Very motivated!  I know, I'm a total weirdo.

Thankfully, the renewed energy extends to my quilty projects!  Before the power went out last week, I was working on this:

I don't know why the camera washes out yellow greens.  This is actually a beautiful color!

This is the first thing I finished when I got home, even before I put in the laundry.  Then I still had energy, so I went ahead and finished off another one:

For those who have forgotten (and it's been forever since I worked on this) these are two of the remaining blocks for one of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilts from last year.  These are 24-inch blocks made from the Moda Love pattern (free!).  The stars have crumb centers, with the rest being made from scraps, including white scraps.

I had visions of finishing this this week, since I thought there was not that much more to be done.  When I opened the project box, though, I found these two stars that needed frames, plus:

Yep, the orange star needs a frame, too.  Saddest of all is this:

The aqua center doesn't even have a star at all!  So there's some more work to do, and then I'll be ready to put this together.  I think it's been in a project box long enough, don't you?

Hope you all are inspired and motivated and happily working along on your projects!  Hey, it's very warm outside, so why not stay in the AC and sew?  I have some writing to do, but then it's back to the projects!

Have a great weekend!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and soscrappy.

Catching up

Hello everyone, and welcome to what promises to be a very wet weekend.  According to the TV weather people, this is a good time to stock up on bottled water and batteries.  Or maybe not.  They can't decide.

So, now that all the excitement surrounding the pope has died down and all the roads are open again, I actually got to sew a little bit.  I feel like I am so behind on everything!  I'm letting myself down, but I've resolved to catch up.  The first thing to catch up on was these crumb blocks for the framed stars quilt:

Indoor picture! Raining!

Okay, the indigo block isn't really a crumb block, but I only had enough indigo (or what passes for indigo around here) for one lonely little string block.  I already decided to carry the string blocks over to next year so that I'll actually have enough for a quilt, so into a framed star it goes.

The orange and brown are actual crumb blocks.  It turns out that I have quite a lot of brown bits left over from the Terrestrial Star quilt, so I had plenty for a crumb block and enough for the row quilt too.  Plenty happy about that!

Then I actually made enough progress that I finished all three stars:

That's a raindrop, not a stain!

Oh, happiness. Slightly damp happiness, but still.

After all this time using up my white on white scraps, it turns out that I don't have enough big leftovers to make the frames from just scraps, so I didn't get to make the frames.  Well, I'd probably have enough if I wasn't so danged picky about how the white tones must match each other, but it will be just a lot more fun to go pick out some yardage.  Easier too!

That was my sewing week!  I'm slowly starting to feel at home here (I must be slow to adapt) and am getting back to a regular schedule for my sewing.  I've had a tough time with the traffic eating up so much of my time, but I'm getting used to it.

Oh, gosh, one last thing!  My kids got me a new camera for my birthday (thanks kids!) and all of the pictures in this post were taken with the new one. Yay!  But I have to show you the last picture taken with the old camera:

 Leeanna from Not Afraid of Color and I met up and got to go to a quilt show last weekend!  It was so fun to meet her and to have a friend to critique the quilts with. We enjoyed a lot of the same ones and had a great time.  Thanks Leeanna!  (I am the weirdo on the left. Leeanna is the sweet and lovely lady on the right.)

Everyone have a great weekend!  Stay dry if possible, and if the rain keeps you inside, I'll bet I can think up something you can do!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict,  soscrappy, and Finish it up Friday.

Framed in red

Good morning, all!  I don't know about you, but I think July is going way too fast.  How did this happen?  The winter always seems so long and the summer so fast.  That hardly seems fair to me.  Plus, I went shopping for some sandals (it is July, after all) and found that they were mostly gone, replaced by--are you ready?--boots.  Aaah!  Back-to-school displays have been up for weeks, but I'm hanging on to summer by my fingernails!

Not only am I running out of summer, I'm running out of red!  For today's block, I actually had to purchase a half yard of red.  I had a red kid print in the stash, but I didn't think it would work too well for this block.  Many of the little scraps were also more of a burgundy, but I'm calling them red for this project.

First up, of course, is the red crumb block, brought to us today through the miracle of cropping, since I forgot to take a stand-alone picture of it:

Lots of bits and bobs there.  I basically scrounged every red bit that I could find.  I also used Amanda's "scrap vortex" technique again, which works really well.  There is a reason to save all those little pieces!  It does my heart good to see them going into a quilt.

Then they got made into a star, of course:

Well, that looks festive!

And then, finally, the frame:

I like it!  I think it will play well with the others and add a spark to the quilt.  I am so ready to stitch them together, but I know I'll regret it if I do!  Patience is a virtue, but it's a hard one to practice.

That's all from here for today!  Hope you get some sewing in before it's time to get out the rakes and shovels again!  (I have a BIG announcement coming later this week, so be sure to check back on Friday!)

Linking to Linky Tuesday, Let's Bee Social, and at soscrappy for RSC15.

Halfway there

Hi all! Hope you had a wonderful 4th of July.  That was a very long celebration this year, wasn't it? The hubs had a 4-day weekend, so we had a mini-vacation of sorts, plus we got a few things done around the house.  It was nice.

Lots of things are happening around here, and today I'm pulling out all of my RSC15 projects at the halfway point of this year.  I decided that I have too many projects.  Somebody remind me next year not to do so much, because I will totally listen to you and scale back on everything.

First up is the row quilt, which is my major RSC project this year:

Wow, I love it!  I swear they are all the same length--it's the fence that's off.  The rows are just pinned here, and I'm planning to use sashing between the rows, so this will be a large-ish quilt.

Next are the 12-inch blocks, which weren't a part of the original plan but are an offshoot of the block tutorials.

A little washed out, but you get the idea. These will make their own quilt, and I just this weekend thought of an interesting setting for them.  It might require me to buy gray fabric.  That will be an interesting shopping trip, because I never buy gray and don't even know what's out there.

Next are the Framed blocks:

Gosh, how can I not love this quilt?  They're a little wrinkly from having been in a project box, but I still think they look great. These are crumb star centers set in Angela's sawtooth stars and then set in large frames made from the Moda Love pattern.  My fingers are itching to stitch these together! I know I should wait, but I'm ready!

Next are the Paper Dolls, which was my original project to use up weird scraps.  The blue and green dolls never got a picture of their own, so here they are:

And here is the whole family:

Once I let these girls outside, they became unruly and didn't want to stay still for their picture. At least no one ran away.

I'm thrilled to pieces with this quilt so far.  The original pattern has 49 dolls, but I think I'll probably end up with 60 or so, based on the number of months left.  It will be a row wider than the original pattern, but I think it will still be okay.

Last but not least, a collection of string blocks:

They look happy in that little pile, don't they?  I have no real plan for these, but they're fun to make and use up a lot of odd pieces of fabric.

So that's my status report!  I think they're looking good, although I'm starting to be worried about having enough scraps to finish.  I've used up the light blues and most of the aqua, and don't have a lot of red or brown.  I guess we;ll have to adapt as necessary.

Happy sewing, everyone!

Linking to Let's Bee Social,  WIP Wednesday and Angela at soscrappy.

Is it May or October?

Hello, all! What a lovely fall day we're having! It's very windy, though. I know the calendar says May, but we have a freeze warning for tonight, so someone better tell the weather to get in line. It's not listening to me, but one of you may have better luck.

On a much happier note, I've finished just about everything that has an immediate deadline, and the weather has been crummy, so I had a little time to sew so far this week. Here's what I started with:

This is what I'm calling the green crumb block. Turns out that I have very few actual scraps of dark green, though I do have many fat quarters and half yards.  Why cut those up to make "scraps?" So I used what I had, which was pieces that are not exactly strings, but not crumbs, either. I'm calling this a tile block. I was much more comfortable with this than with actual crumb blocks, so I bet we'll be seeing this style again really soon.

Of course, the tile block then became a star block:

Pinned to the tree!

Okay, I think that looks great! Since I had some time, I kept going and the star block became a framed block:

Lilacs in the background!

This looks a little fuzzy, but it isn't out of focus, that's just the fabric. I think it looks fabulous.  I am really liking these blocks.

Of course, I had to get a "family picture" of all these blocks, too:

This was as good as it got with all the wind. I think they look wonderful together. Can't hardly wait to start putting them together!

Finally, I have to tell everyone about the major score I made this past weekend. My friend Renee and I went to Nancy's Notions warehouse sale, which is always a great time. We had a blast! In the clearance area they had "grab bags" that were marked down to $1.49, so I grabbed five of them.  Here's what was inside:

More than 7 yards of fabric! Those big pieces are all at least a quarter yard, with most bigger. One of them is more than half a yard.  This kind of thing never happens to me, so I just had to share!

Hope everyone has a good and productive week, and I hope the weather is better where you are!

Linking to Let's Bee Social and WIP Wednesday, plus Scraphappy Saturday.