Small distractions

 Hi everyone! I hope you're all doing well today. Still hot and rainy here, so, you know, looking to start growing mushrooms on my north side any time now. Unbelievably, this weekend is our one-year anniversary in Baltimore. For some reason, this feels really momentous. Maybe it's the heat. Or the quarantine. Who could have known what the last year would bring? 

This week I needed some distractions from everything that's going on, but I just didn't have the mental energy to work on anything important. Do you ever feel that way? You want to sew, but you don't know what to make; you need to look at and feel some fabric, but it just feels like too much to cut it and think about what to do with it.  That was me all week.

So I dove into the "parts and pieces" bin and also a small stack of precuts, and I came up with these two small pieces:

 

Not a great picture! I told you that it's been raining and the light is all weird. I hope you can see anyway that these are two small tops, one a table topper and the other a baby quilt top bound for donation.

Let's talk about the pretty yellow one first:

 

Should have pressed better, but I was racing the weather. (UPDATED with a better picture. The rare time when indoors is better.) All of the pieces in the center were already made and were leftover from one of my very favorite quilts, from a fabric line called Portugal by April Cornell. See that yellow in the center? I loved that fabric so much. Still do! Most fabrics you fall out of love with because they look dated or you just get sick of them, but this one is enduring, at least to me.

 

I didn't want to think, so I just pushed these hsts through the machine and made six small Broken Dishes blocks, then put them together to make a pile of Broken Dishes. I didn't have any yardage, just the hsts and some crumbs, but I think the yellow and the green work out okay. This will be a table topper for use around the house after I quilt it up.

And if you want to talk about pushing things through the machine, there's this little baby quilt:

 

This quilt is just 36 by 36 and is destined to be a quilt for Jack's Basket. It was made from some charm squares that I got as a part of some fabric that I bought from Busy Hands Quilts when she was de-stashing. I usually dislike precuts--and don't get me wrong, I still do-- but these were super simple to push through the machine, first in pairs, then into rows and then into a big square. Calming as long as I didn't think too much about it, and I really didn't. My only concern was that none of the same fabrics end up next to each other. It only happened once in this top, and even then I didn't care. That never happens!

 

Unbelievably, this used up all but one of the charm squares! This is great, because who knew what else I would have done with them? Sadly, I don't know the name of the fabric line, but it's a bit old, and it has these great bees on a grayish-blue background. Since I had the yellow out from the table topper, I used that for the inner border, and a pale blue for the outer border. Overall I think it's a soft little quilt for a tiny person, and I'm happy with how it turned out (even if the pictures make it look really bad. It needs pressing, I know.)

Those were my "big" stress-busting finishes for this week! Sometimes the fabric stress busting works, sometimes it doesn't. This time it did make me feel a bit better. And so did this:

 

We haven't had a deer with antlers before, and I don't know where he came from. The part that you can't see is that in the grass behind him is a red fox, which never came into the clearing but could be seen now and then just the same. Maybe I really *am* a Disney princess. . .  

Have a good weekend everyone!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and Quilting is More Fun Than Housework.

Spring into fall

Hi everyone, and happy weekend! We made it through another week. Yay us! Plus, I'm happy to say that I can now do laundry at my house again. It's a small thing, but a really important one. You don't think you'll miss it, but then you run out of clean clothes and all becomes clear. Five hundred dollars later, I have clean socks again. 

And hey-- this week, I finally finished something. Yahoo!

This is the small topper that I made back at the Delaware house. It's small, and it's all scraps, and it's a little bit spring-like for the fall, but I really like it.

The center of this little piece is just a simple cross hatch done with a walking foot. I've really grown to like that look. It's a little old fashioned, but it always looks good.

For the leaves and the sashing, I decided to experiment and use some of the embroidery stitches on the machine.  It's hard to see on the sashing, but it looks pretty good. It seemed like a good piece to experiment on, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

I love the purple binding, which was also a scrap! I went looking for a leftover bit of dark green, but I had just enough of the purple for a single fold binding. Seems like a win to me!

Even though it's a bit spring-like, I'm going to use this on the table anyway. We haven't painted yet (short, sad story) and the colors are still extremely depressing, so I need something cheerful. I could maybe dress it up with a few pumpkins or something, don't you think?

Finally, this is a blurry picture, but it was quite windy when I was taking pictures, so the wind gave us a peek of the backing:

Not a great picture, but I like it anyway!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend! Now that the laundry is taken care of, we may take down a huge mirror in the bathroom. Huge as in covering the entire wall, so you can watch yourself shower, I guess. We have a plan and a hammer, so it must go!

Strips with style

Hello everyone!  It's Labor Day weekend--can you believe it?  It has been a really wild summer for us and I'm not that sorry to see it wind down.  It would be a great time right now, but where we are the temperature is still in the 90s.  It's like the summer we didn't have before.  Now that we've tasted it, though, it can cool down any time.

My big finish for this week is this:

A fun liitle bargello runner!

This is a Row by Row Experience kit from Lyons Quilting in Colorado, where my husband's brother and his family live.  This little runner is destined for my sister-in-law, who wants it for a very specific place, I think.

Almost too pretty to cut up!

This is the very first time I've ever done bargello, believe it or not.  It's such a common technique that I can't believe I haven't tried it before. I thought it was pretty easy, though I did have some trouble making such a large strip set.

I've made plenty of strip sets, but this was 13 strips, which got a little unwieldy.  I found it better to alternate sewing directions with each new strip, and to press from the back instead of the front.  This made everything a lot straighter and a lot flatter.

This was a very easy technique, and I'm planning to try it again, but with a bigger pieces.  These little squares end up at 1 inch each, which is actually pretty small.

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Everybody have a great Labor Day weekend.  We are planning to relax and maybe explore some of our new surroundings, if it isn't too hot.  There's nowhere for a grill or anything at the condo, so we're going to have to come up with some new traditions.

Happy sewing! Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict  and Finish it up Friday.