Plenty of pieces

Hi everyone!  You'll be glad to know that I finished my paper, though it is extremely boring.  Even I'm bored with it, so I am happy that it's finished and out of here.  Still have not painted the hallway, though.  Another boring task that I am putting off!  Not nearly as vital as the paper, though.

With that finished, I've got a bunch of pieces of various projects floating around the sewing room, just waiting for those projects to be finished up. Lots and lots of pieces. Good thing I know where they go!  Let's take a look--

First up is the June quilt quilt along from crazymomquilts.  I've got all the pieces finished and laid out on the design wall and have started putting it together:

You can see that I made a mistake and cut the corners from the cornerstone fabric instead of the background, so this corner is wrong.  The correct fabric is pinned up there so I can fix it later, and the other corners are fine.  I'm hoping to have this all together this week, just so I can take it off the wall and put something else up there.

The second project that I'm working on involves making a *ton* of these units:

These are the last units I have to make for the En Provence quilt that I started making last winter.  This was Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt, and it has--as usual--lots and lots of pieces.  I've made all the other units, but I've put off making these ones until the end.  I know these are really useful units, but for some reason I've just been dreading making them.  I just think they're really fussy to cut, and they take a lot of time to cut correctly.  That notch is really important, but somehow I mess it up.  I've got about 200 of these to make in various colors, so I don't see myself finishing them before the end of the summer.  But at least I've started!

Finally (at least for now), I have these pieces for the Steps to the Garden blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge:

Last month's color was green, and since there's so much green in the blocks already, I skipped the green month.  Since I only need 30 blocks, I was going to skip one month anyway.  This month was yellow and I thought for sure I'd have a bunch of yellows.  I was wrong!  What I did have was some pretty greens that won't get lost with the other greens that are already in the block.  I have plenty of yellows, but only one that I really want to use in this quilt, so it looks like I have to go shopping or something, right?

Anyway, I'm going to make the Steps blocks as soon as I finish piecing the June quilt.  Maybe this week?  Maybe not.  I guess we'll see!

Hope you're having a lovely week!  The weather here is beautiful so far this week, so I'm glad I'm no longer trapped in the library.  Paper's still boring, but at least the stitching is not!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

I Spy more rain

Hi everyone!  I have a little quilt top to show you today, but getting pictures of it was a bear.  I took some pictures yesterday but they were not great, so I thought I'd take a few this morning and post them then.  This morning there was more rain!  This has been the hardest adaptation of our big move--the weather.  Seriously, the amount of precipitation here makes the Midwest look like an absolute desert.  I finally got out there in between the raindrops, so if you see some spots, that's rain, not dirt.

Remember how I was supposed to finish my paper this week?  I did not finish my paper.  This is a cause for sadness, because it means I have to keep working on it and I am sick of it.  Plus, it's boring. But I did finish my little I Spy quilt top, so there is also great happiness!  Here's the quilt top:

That's a pretty happy little top, isn't it?  I was planning to use a black polka dot for the setting triangles, but it was too overwhelming.  I switched to a gray and white polka dot instead.  I know--gray!  I can't believe it either, but it looks good.  And I have a stripe for the binding, so I think the gray will set that off nicely, too.

This little top was so fun to make.  I do love the square in a square block.  They're easy and fast to make and they turn out looking really good, too.  The inner square is 5 inches, and the sides are 4-inch squares cut in half once.  If you don't care about round numbers, these are really nice-sized pieces to work with--just big enough not to be too fussy, and small enough to make an interesting fussy-cut center.  This makes a block that finishes at about 6-3/8 inches square,  but is just about 9-1/8 on the diagonal.  This top is about 46 inches square.

If I had any sense, I would have used some solid alternate blocks, but instead I matched all those points.  The best way I know to do this is to put a pin straight through both of the points-- and then stitch right over the pin.  I know, I know, but it worked for me.  Also, I am not really an advocate of oversizing things and then cutting them down to the right size, but setting triangles are the exception to that rule.  Oversizing those makes everything so much better when it comes to squaring up the quilt.

Once it dries out, I plan to quilt this with a walking foot so that I can have it ready to take when we go visit our grandson (and his parents) in a few weeks.  There's so much pattern and color in here already that I think just some lines to emphasize the blocks will be enough.  Maybe some meandering to make it cuddly.  We'll see how I feel when I sit down with it.

Hope everyone has a good weekend.  I might finish that paper!  Or maybe I'll paint the hallway instead.  Pretty sad that those are equally appealing!

And just to mention this, this is my 300th post!  Who would have thought?

Sharing at Finished or Not Friday, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and crazymomquilts.

Happy little projects

Hi everyone, and welcome to another scorcher.  I know some of you are in far worse straits than I am--Phoenix, I'm looking at you with deep sympathy!--but, gosh, it's a sauna out there.  Thank goodness that I've been spending a lot of time in an air-conditioned library.  And drinking lots of cold beverages.  But not at the same time, because that's not allowed.

Because I have to finish this paper I'm working on, I've just been plugging away at the current projects, little by little.  They're pretty happy projects, though, so it's fun to work on them, especially after spending most of the day with books and papers.  The first one is the I Spy quilt:

Bernie and I traded some of our I Spy pieces, so now I've got a lot more variety.  See that cute bird on the left? I'm almost done with the blocks for this size (some blocks aren't on the wall), but I think I'm going to add one more vertical row to make this a bit bigger.  According to my figuring, that will make it about 45 inches wide, which is a good size for a toddler.  I'm auditioning the black polka dots for setting triangles, but I'm not too sure.  I might want something brighter. With any luck, I can finish this top up this week.

I also worked some more on the June quilt from Amanda at crazymomquilts.  I've got all the pieces cut now, and just a few of the string sections left to do:

I think it's going to look lovely, don't you?  I'll be really, really happy to finish off those string sections, though, because they're getting just a tiny bit tedious.

Finally, I couldn't resist taking a picture of the latest block for the Sewcial Bee Sampler outside among the wild daylilies:

These lilies are such a happy surprise.  They grow along the creek on the edge of our property, and they look pretty good there.  I wan't sure they were going to flower, but all of a sudden they're covered in buds.

So that's what I'm up to, besides trying not to get burned on the car door handles every time I go to get in it.  I really am hoping to have that I Spy top finished this week.  If it's a choice between finishing the top or the paper, which one should I go for?  Tough choice!

Everyone stay cool!  Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

Small update

Hi all!  Another week is in the books, can you believe it?  Where did it go?  Well, I kind of know where mine went.  I spent a lot of time in the library this week, which was nice because it was all air conditioned, but since it was an academic library, there were very few people around.  I got a lot of work done, but not a lot of sewing done.  It's a trade-off, but it worked out for me this time around.

Here's pretty much all the stitching I got finished:

These are some of the sections for the June quilt quilt along at crazymomquilts.  I got about half the sections finished and cut up a bunch more fabric into strings so that I can finish the rest of them.  I'm hoping to get all 48 sections done by the next step.

I think these are going to look good with the polka dot background fabric:

I'm thinking of using the lavender squares as cornerstones, but I also thought about an apple green.  Any opinions?

I initially started with just the pink and green and a few yellows, but I had to add in some florals with a white background to temper a little bit of the sweetness of the quilt.  Plus it uses up those florals, which I am happy to get rid of. 

Strings make a mess, but they turn out great.  My one tip for making these sections is to put wide strings at the top and the bottom because that will give some "wiggle room" to trim up the section to the correct length.  It worked well for me and too some of the pressure off getting the sections exactly right.

The only other fabric-related thing I did this week was to make some fabric stacks for the 30 days of fabric stacks challenge from Stitched in Color, being run on Instagram.  Here's my latest, for the color orange:

Carrot and mango smoothies, the breakfast of champions!  The next prompt is "new fabric," though, so I may have to go shopping.  Come on over to Instagram and play along, or just look at all the great pictures.

So that was it, if you don't count the research notes!  I hope you got in a bit more stitching than I did, and I hope you have a great weekend!

And for those of you keeping track, I now have 7 tomatoes growing.  I am ecstatic!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and Oh Scrap!