Time for a cool change

(The monthly scrap giveaway is at the end of this post!)

Is anyone else melting?  Good golly, it's hot.  Apparently something like 160 million of us here in the US are experiencing the same heat wave. I wish that just touching these cool aqua scraps would cool a person off, but no, it doesn't work that way.  Thank goodness we get to make cool things from them, right?

Today I just want to share an update on my aqua RSC projects.  Aqua is a great color and it was fun to work with these pieces.  True fact: the main decorative color in my house is aqua, including my kitchen.  It's both calming and invigorating, depending on the light.  And somehow it looks different every time I look at it.

On to the projects! Let's start with the hollow 9-patches:

I stopped at ten of these little blocks, but it was difficult.  They're just so cute!

Next up are the patchwork scrap stars:

This month I used a black and white print scrap and a bright floral scrap for the stars.  They kind of blend in this picture, but in person they look great.

Finally, there are the aqua galaxy stars:

The quest for perfect centers continues, as you can see.  A better person than me might remake some of them, but I think they're good enough.  I just like the colors against the dark blues.

So that's this month's progress!  I feel like things are moving along pretty well. All progress is good, right?

Now it's time for the scrap giveaway for this month! If you recall, for this year I'm giving away the remaining scraps of each color after I finish the projects for the month.  Here's what I have to give away for this month:

There are a lot of scraps here, and some pieces are pretty big, but some of them are fairly small as well.  Who really knows what's here?  I do know that it's more than a pound of fabric.  I'm also including an unopened small spool of aqua Aurifil thread and a handful of both 2-inch and 1-1/2 inch squares.

This giveaway is now closed!  Thanks to all!

If you live in the US or Canada, and you would like to have this package full of goodies show up at your door at no cost to you, just leave a comment on this post!  Really!  Just for fun, tell us how you're keeping cool in this massive heat wave.  I admit to needing some new, non-boring ideas.  Popsicles are really not cutting it any more.  I'll use the random number generator on Monday night, July 2, to choose a winner. 

Everybody drink lots of water and stay cool!  And if you're in Canada, a happy Canada Day on Sunday!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC18

Fast, easy, and finished

Hi everyone, and welcome to another summer weekend!  They're slipping away really fast, aren't they?  I can't believe that on Sunday it will already be July.  July! I have too much left to do for it to be July already.  Something tells me that I may not get it all done.

Here's one thing I did get done-- this week I finished up this fun little quilt:

This is a simple 16-patch that I made from some Island Batik strips that I got for Mother's Day.  It was super-easy and went really fast.  And now it's all finished, including a binding, which is a semi-miracle.

For this quilt, I just took the two darker strips from one end of the set and matched them up with the two from the lighter end of the package, then made a strip set from those and kept going the same way until they were all used up.  I got 4 blocks from each strip set with only a small piece left over.  Sure, I could have stressed over matching up colors, but I'm proud to say that I didn't.  This method worked out pretty well.

With these strips I encountered something that I never came across before in precuts-- some of the strips were bowed at the center, which means that they made a "v" when opened up.  I was able to work around most of them, but there were two that were bad enough that I couldn't use them.  I substituted another piece from my stash and just threw out the bad ones. The rest of the fabric in the quilt top is just the strips from the package, which feels great to me.

The quilting here is just a simple cross hatch with the walking foot, which worked out really well.  I was able to get a lot of the quilt done without breaking thread by just pivoting and turning the quilt.  It finished at about 48 by 56, which is a decent lap size, and was small enough that I could maneuver it pretty well. 

The backing is just a piece of batik that I had in my stash for a long time.  I was so happy to use that up!  During the quilting, I kept checking the back to make sure there were no wrinkles.  The backing turned out completely flat except for one tiny tuck.  I planned to go back and fix that at the end, but after I finished all the rows I couldn't find the tuck any more.  Let's hear it for busy backings!

I made 40 blocks from the strips in the package, and then I had to make two more to fill out the layout.  I thought that I would just add in some pieces from the stash, but I was able to use the pieces leftover from the strip sets to make 2 multi-colored blocks.  (Look carefully and you'll find them.)  This means that all the fabric I have left from the quilt top is these pieces that were too narrow to use in the multicolor blocks:

That's a win for sure!  These will get cut up for scraps at some point.  Not sure what I'm going to do with the quilt itself.  I'm thinking of selling it.  I like it a lot, but I have so many that the house is slowly becoming a quilt storage facility.  I'll see if anyone in the family wants to claim it, then it just might be for sale.  Watch this space!

So there's my fast and easy finish! Sometimes it feels good to finish up something easy, you know?  Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.  Apparently, we are going to start a seven-day heat wave, which will include dangerous heat over 100 degrees (38C), so I'll try to stay inside and have some cool drinks.  Perhaps at a place where they show movies.  Sounds good to me!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Let's Bee Social.

Harry and me

Hi all!  First, let me say a great big THANKS to everyone who responded to my last post with suggestions about full-spectrum lights and bulbs, and encouragement about the blues, or just to let me know I'm not alone.  I'm really fine, but I have purchased a bunch of lights and bulbs to experiment with.  It's amazing how many different choices there are out there.  I'll let you know how it goes!

This week it's been sunny and cooler so far, so I've been spending a lot of time working outside.  We're painting the shutters and window frames on the house now, and by "we" I mean "me."  Just a part of having the summer "free." I don't mind it at all, and the payoff will be great, but it takes a bunch of time.  I did get to start the Harry Potter quilt, though.

As I said last week, my daughter has requested a Harry Potter quilt, and she chose a really easy pattern for me.  It's by Pieces by Polly and is available HERE.  I started with the crest for the center:

This is not all finished off yet, but all the pieces are tacked in the right places.  The pattern calls for fusible applique, but I don't like that, as we all know, so I've just gone with raw edge applique.  I'll stitch around all of the pieces, then I intend to cut out behind the appliques so that the crest remains soft on the finished quilt, and so no shadows show through. 

Then I cut up the fabrics and started playing with squares! 

I'm not quite there yet, but it's fun to move things around.  This isn't exactly like the pattern, because I wanted more variety in the squares, but it's close enough.  After this there are three more sections, but I expect those to go faster.  We all know that Gryffindor is the most important one to get right, isn't it?

That's a pretty nice beginning, I think!  It's supposed to rain and be really hot for the rest of the week, so I'll be working on this some more instead of painting.  Gee, won't that be awful?  At least I'll have some new lights to try out while I'm stitching!

Hope you're having a great week!  Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

At the halfway point

Hi friends!  How was your week?  It has been an interesting one around here, and it won't surprise anyone to know that it's raining again.  It's been almost three years since we moved to the East coast from the Midwest, and by far the hardest thing to adjust to has been the frequent rain.  The grocery stores, too, but the precipitation has been the big thing. I never realized how much rain affected me, either.  I'm thinking of buying a full-spectrum light for the rainy days.  Anyone have a recommendation?

Good thing there are nice, happy colors in fabrics, right? Today I'm showing off my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects at the halfway mark.  There are ten colors for this year and halfway was really May, not June.  I meant to do this at the beginning of the month but was so exhausted that I forgot.  Oh, well!  They're just as pretty now.

Let's start with the patchwork scrap stars:

Well, those look festive, don't they? This quilt will be really cute and full of nice bright colors.  I've promised this one to a friend and I hope she's following along and likes what she sees.

If you look closely at the stars, you'll see that in addition to being colorful and fun, they're also a bit damp.  It's been raining, and I was fooled when the sun came out in patches for a bit.  Sadly, there was a sunshower when I was taking these photos, and then the clouds opened up, so the rest of the photos are indoors.  Here are my 10-inch Squared Away blocks up to this point:

This is going to be a great quilt!  I think they all fit together pretty well.  The purples stand out as kind of dark, but they'll blend a lot better after we add some more of the darker colors this fall.  If you recall, I'm also making 15-inch blocks this year, with dark blue backgrounds.  Here's where they stand right now:

One of the quilts I'm planning for these blocks is a layout just like this, so this makes a nice preview of the final quilt.

Last up is the hollow 9-patches:

I love these little blocks so much that I might just keep making them after the RSC is over for this year.  They're fast and use up a bunch of 2-inch squares, and we can always find a use for some 9-patches, can't we?  I have more than enough for one donation quilt right now, but I know I'll be able to make enough for two quilts with a lot of color variety by the end.

So there are my projects halfway through the challenge! I'm pretty happy with how they stand right now.  All that's missing here are the galaxy stars, but I'll show those next week.  Some of them may have fallen into a small puddle when I was rushing to get everything else inside and away from the rain.  Yeah, those are going to need washing...

Hope your projects are going well! How about showing us all a halfway picture?  If nothing else, they all look so pretty together, and I think it's motivating to see how far along the project is.  And it encourages other people too!

Have a lovely, dry weekend!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC18.