Dashing through the crisis

Hello all! How are you all doing? Show of hands-- who has resorted to cutting their own hair? Who has thought about it? Yes, me too. I need to get this hair out of my eyes really soon. Although I'm out of contact lenses, so I'm not sure I'd be able to see anything anyway.

THANK YOU all so much for your supportive and kind comments on my last post. I especially want to thank those of you who are no-reply and I couldn't thank personally. I really, really appreciate all your kindness. I'm doing a little better now. It helps just to know you're not alone, you know? Plus, one of my committees had its last meeting (over Zoom, ugh) and another one is finished this week, so that helps a lot. Plus the semester will be over in just three weeks, and I'm starting to see the light at the end of that tunnel. I'm pretty sure it's not a train, too!

Some of you suggested just stitching anything mindless, and I've finally come to the realization that that is the best possible advice. It's like my classes-- I had to throw out what I had planned and make a new plan.  My new plan involved those bright batiks I showed last time, an easy, easy block, and a few hours of fairly mindless stitching. This is what that looks like so far:

Yahoo, some fun churn dashes! True fact: I am not fond of churn dashes, but I love how they look on point. I went back and forth between churn dash and shoo fly, because they look really similar to me when they're on point. So I guess that will be the layout, don't you think? That green one reminds me so much of  a watermelon rind that my mouth is watering. Gosh, I hope we get to have watermelon this year.

So far I've made about a dozen of these babies:

I feel like I can get maybe 8 out of each fat quarter, which would make a decent-sized quilt top. I didn't measure or calculate, but these are 6-inch blocks. Right now I'm just happy that they're actually turning out to be cute blocks in happy colors. It's literally the most I can do right now.

For just a bit more mindless sewing, I'm planning something using this box of fun squares:

along with these blocks:

Yep, that was an RSC project, but I need the mindless sewing more than an RSC project.  We'll see what happens.

Again, thanks for the support, everyone. It meant so much to me and got me through a hard week.  I hope you're all staying healthy, and that you're making it through the quarantine okay. And if your hair is screaming "everyone stay six feet away," you are definitely not alone. Good thing I won't use my fabric scissors for anything else, isn't it?

Summer florals

Hi all!  Is it unbearably hot at your house? Right now my handy dandy weather station says that it's 96 degrees. That's a bit extreme, don't you think? It's supposed to rain tomorrow and break the heat, and for once I'll be thrilled to see rain around here.  In our ongoing housing saga, we think we've found another house. Hurray! Send all your good thoughts that they accept our offer.  Every finger I have is crossed!

So, if you remember, I somehow packed my favorite quarter inch foot when I was packing up the sewing room.  That was a dumb move! I finally gave in and bought a new one, and then I had to test it out to be sure I liked the seam it gave.  Everyone has to do that, right?  Well, one thing led to another and I ended up with this:

That's a lovely little test piece, don't you think?  Obviously I had a lot of sewing mojo built up because I just kept stitching, and it was such a joy. 

This took just a couple of afternoons when no one was scheduled to tour the house.  I admit that I didn't draw lines on all of those little squares, so some of the corners are a little bit "organic."  I love them anyway, and we all know that real flowers aren't perfect, so I refuse to let myself feel bad about it at all.

This whole piece is made from scraps. For the flowers, I sorted through my box of 2-1/2 inch squares and just chose the first nine that had four matching squares.  The leaves all came from the 2-1/2 inch squares box, too. The flower centers came from the 1-1/2 inch square box, though they had to be trimmed down just a bit. The lavender sashing was in the string jar, which is sitting out and acting decorative in one of the bedrooms.

I actually had a pattern for this, though I didn't really need it once I got going.  It's from Quilt Sampler magazine from. . . Spring 2012.  Yeah, it took that long.  But it was worth the wait!

I plan to quilt this up and use it on the table just as soon as there is time to set up the machine for an hour or two again. It looks great already, but I think it will look even better with a simple crosshatch.  I think I have a scrap binding that's big enough if I can locate the ziplock bag I put those in. Pretty sure I know where it is, though, which is a good thing because I don't know where half my clothes are right now.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend that is nice and cool.  We will have all of our fingers crossed, plus we have three showings and then an open house, so we'll be busy.  Send many good thoughts!

It's still Friday, so I'm sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or not Friday, as well as Alycia's TGIFF and Cynthia's Oh Scrap!

Squarely quilted

Hi all, and happy May weekend! I hope you are all doing really well and enjoying the spring. Unbelievably, the weather here has been terrific, so much so that I managed to get some great pictures of today's finished project.  And I've been working outside every day this week, though I did stop yesterday when I saw a snake in the pachysandra.  That's the one thing I genuinely despise about this area-- snakes. They just creep me out completely.  Although we have a creek in the backyard, so I don't know what I was expecting.

Not to worry, no snakes came anywhere near today's project! Here is a really lovely picture taken in the park in the sunshine:

Yes, my Squared Away quilt is finally quilted and bound and super cozy! If you recall, this is the quilt that came from last year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge project that Angela and I designed.  (You can still find all the patterns HERE and HERE.) I just love how this quilt turned out.

Oooh, artsy! Not artificial light, just the sun through the trees.

This was quilted by Alycia of Quiltygirl Quilts, and she did a great job with it.  I had a bunch of ideas, and she took them and ran with them. I think the collaboration turned out great.  Look at all the circles she quilted in:

Aren't those awesome? They must have been fun to do, and a great choice for a quilt made of squares.  And the design in the setting triangles is fantastic, too:

As you can see, I used a medium green for the binding.  My original idea was to use a scrappy binding, but it just wasn't looking good.  I also intended to do a machine binding, but hand stitching this to the back was really relaxing and I really needed that.  If you remember, earlier I had switched out the setting triangles and taken off the borders, so all in all this was a demanding quilt!

So there's the end to last year's RSC quilt sampler project! This one is definitely staying with me, as my kids have made off with the ones from previous years. I think I deserve to keep this one, don't you? 

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! We're finally going to see the Avengers movie, which I hear is really good.  Then there's some more stressful stuff to do, but we'll talk about that later!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, TGIFF, Finished or Not Friday, and soscrappy for RSC19.

Making it up as I go

Ever have one of those days when you have so many projects going on that you can't decide which one to work on, so you end up working on nothing?  Yeah, I've had those, too!  I almost had one this week, in fact.  I have a lot of unfinished stuff laying around here and I organized it all and then couldn't decide which one to take on first.

Thankfully, I have had this same problem before, so I knew the best thing to do was just grab whatever was closest and start stitching.  That's how I ended up working on the 1-1/2 inch square project.  In the process of stitching up more blocks I also figured out how I plan to set them:

Yep, this will be it!  As you can see, the first thing I did was put a 1-1/2 inch white strip around the 100-patch blocks.  This stabilized all the little seams on the edges of that block and also meant that there would be no nightmare scenarios that would involve matching all those seams from block to block.  (Can you imagine?)

I had played around with having strips of alternating white and colored squares surrounding each block, but it turns out that all those strips of squares are really stretchy!  Plus I had this thing about making sure all the seams matched up with the seams in the block, even though they were separated by that solid white.  Talk about crazy-making!  So I gave up on that and went with just the squares in the corners.  That way I'll still get to use up some more of the eleventy-billion squares I have and I'll get this cool pattern:

Is that cool or what?  If I use 4-patches as cornerstones with some white sashing, I'll use up even more squares and have a super-cool secondary pattern too.  And I am all about the super cool secondary pattern!  For some reason I hate making 4-patches, but I'll do it for this.

These blocks are actually going pretty quickly, considering.  The hard part is sorting out all the colors:

I know I should have sorted them all at once, but I did start out with about 12,000 of these babies, and that's a lot to sort through!

I don't know how many of these blocks I'll eventually make or how big the quilt will be, but I'm pretty sure it will look good, and I'm having a good time making it, even if it is a mess:

Hope you all are having a good time making fun messes too!  It's still raining almost every day and it's pretty cold for May, and I have no garden, so I expect to get a bunch of sewing time in this week.  At least I hope that's how it goes--you know what happens with sewing plans!

Linking to Let's Bee Social and Oh Scrap!

Taming the tiny pieces

Hi everyone!  Well, the weatherman was wrong.  We got hardly any snow at all this weekend, which I'm quite thankful for, but we stayed in anyway and had a good time watching movies and basketball.  Lots and lots of basketball.  Okay, so the hubs watched the basketball and I did the sewing.  Good division of labor there.

Just a small update on my 1-1/2 inch squares project.  I tried a new method to get the 100-patch blocks to go a little faster.  They turn out cute, but they are somewhat tedious to make.  Here's the latest one, and the first one with this method:

Well, I do love yellow, and it looks pretty springy there in the mulch.  Some yellow flowers would be nice to go along with it, though.  Just saying.

Anyway, I've made a couple of these now using the interfacing method.  This involves fusing the individual squares to interfacing and then picking up the whole piece and stitching the seams in sequence.  This way you only handle the tiny pieces once, and it does make for less distortion in the seams.

Here's how I did it.  First, I cut a piece of freezer paper and drew out a grid of 100 1-1/2 inch squares.  I used the freezer paper because it's nearly impossible to draw on the interfacing, and who wants to draw it all out every time anyway?

I understand that there is interfacing that is pre-printed for just this purpose, but all I could find had 1 inch squares, which is too tiny even for me.  So I just got the lightest fusible interfacing I could find, which is barely more than tissue paper.

I ironed the freezer paper right onto my ironing board and then cut a piece of the fusible interfacing and pinned it glue-side-up over the freezer paper.

Trust me--pin the interfacing!  You don't want to knock it all on the floor just as you've gotten them all in place, do you?

After that, I just started placing the squares on the interfacing, aligning them with the grid:

The block itself builds pretty fast:

Once all the squares are in place, just fuse them down.  They don't have to be perfectly fused, you just want them not to fall off the piece.  At this point you can still peel off any pieces you don't like and replace them, too.

Then you just take the piece to the machine, fold over the first row onto the second, finger press, and stitch.  Keep doing this until all the rows are stitched.  I didn't get any pictures, but the piece will curl up a little as you go, since I didn't stop to press between seams.  I did press after I got all the seams in one direction finished.  Then I turned the piece and stitched all the rows in the other direction.  These were definitely bulkier, but I didn't have any problems stitching them.

Here's the finished back of the piece:

Eeep!  There's mulch on my block!  Plus you can see that I didn't trim it yet.

I liked using this method.  It went pretty fast and it was good to see what the finished block would look like before it was actually stitched.  The finished piece is definitely bulkier than without the interfacing, though.  The interfacing is very light, but it does build up in the seams.  For the next block I'm going to try cutting open the seams and pressing them open before I stitch the rows in the other direction.  I think that will help some, even though I really don't like pressing the seams open.

Okay, I'm off to do some actual work for my actual job!  Have a wonderful week!

Sharing at Linky Tuesday, Let's Bee Social, and Oh Scrap!

Into the woods

Hi folks! Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and are not too stuffed to sew! The hubs and I are having Thanksgiving at our daughter's house, which is great for me because it means very little cooking! I didn't bring my sewing machine, but I do have these to show you:

Don't they look festive? These are the next couple of blocks for the winter quilt BOM from Cindy at Quilt Doodle Doodles that I am working on for the next few weeks. This is a very easy quilt and is very relaxing to work on. Seriously, you can grab a few minutes here and there and make great progress. (You can buy the patterns HERE or HERE).

Here are the three blocks I've done for this quilt all together:

I almost have the major center row done! I am considering "quilting as I go," which is why I'm doing them in this order. I've never done that with a whole quilt before, but why not try it on this one?

Since this was a holiday week, that's all the sewing I got finished! Hey, I'm happy I got anything done. Hope you finished something too! I'm going shopping later for a backing for this. I'm thinking flannel. Sounds cozy and fitting for a winter quilt, doesn't it?

Back to our regularly scheduled projects next week, with some of this thrown in for fun. Enjoy the weekend! Happy sewing!

Linking to Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Amanda Jean at crazy mom quilts. Stop by and get inspired!