The end of summer

 Hi everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I kind of fell off the grid a bit, didn't I? We have been having a family crisis, so I haven't had much time to stitch lately, especially on top of classes starting, but I did want to pop in and show off the last of the quilts I finished this summer. I have been able to escape from the drama just a bit and stitch a few things, and I finally finished the binding on this cutie:

 

 

Well, I'm pretty down right now, but seeing this quilt finished is definitely cheery!  All along while I was quilting it and finishing it, I thought of it as "the end of summer quilt," but its real name is Synergy, a pattern from our friend Preeti at Sew Preeti Quilts.It's a fun and easy pattern, and you can get it right HERE.

I quilted this on my quilty "playdate" with a Baltimore friend, and I used a panto called Seamless from Urban Elementz to finish it off. This panto is really easy and a lot of fun to quilt. It's very swoopy and swirly. I love the texture that it makes, and the exercise I got while quilting it. It's a real arm workout!

For the backing, I used a nice quiet gray with white polka dots. The front has so much color that I couldn't see using something bright on the back as well. The binding was done by machine and is the same fabric as the pink background. I think it looks good! If you have sharp eyes, you'll also notice that I added a small border all around the quilt, mainly to keep all the seams from popping. It helped a lot when quilting it.

If you look at the background of the pictures, you'll see a bunch of fallen leaves already on the ground. Yikes! I think it's been such a hot and wet summer that the trees around here are stressed and losing their leaves already. There isn't a bunch of color yet, but a lot of the trees are starting to turn. Doesn't that seem pretty early to you? I could do with some cooler weather, but all these leaves are falling waaaay too early for me.

So, there is another cheerful quilt to wind up the summer. It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so everybody take some time to hug your family and maybe have a barbecue or something, okay? I will be doing the same!

Sharing at Finished or not Friday, Brag About Your Beauties, and the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique.

Positively handsome

 Hi all! Every year I forget just how exhausting it is to get ready for a new academic year. How is this possible? I've done this a lot of times, so I should know by now, but somehow, I always leave things for the last minute. This is what I've been doing all week instead of sewing or literally any other fun stuff. I know you'll all understand when I say that I really need more summer. Come back, summer! We need more rest in the sunshine!

Ah, well. I've been trying to finish up the summer quilts, and today is the day for the beauty shots of this year's Positivity quilt. Here is the handsome fellow himself:

Pretty good looking, huh? I quilted this one in a nice meander in a medium beige thread and it is so, so soft. The very definition of a comfort quilt, really.

The hidden quilt holder in these pictures is Preeti, who came over one afternoon and held the quilt so I didn't have to pin it to a tree. The fabric is from an old line called Woodroses in Winter by Holly Taylor. (I think) Years ago, I fell into that spell that comes over you when you're with friends and you buy fabric you would never buy otherwise, so I had a bunch of it. I've been trying to use it up ever since. I'm happy to finally see it go into a quilt that will bring someone comfort at a hard time. 

The backing for this quilt is a vintage sheet, which is 100% cotton and very soft. It was perfect for this quilt, and it quilted up really nicely. The binding is just more of the red. Unbelievably, I still have about half a yard of the red left over! I think it was the right choice for binding this quilt.

I like how the twisty blocks turned out, with the secondary pattern, and I am really happy with how the panel pieces worked, too. I was afraid it would look weird, but now I think they really enhance the whole quilt.

 

Some of you may be wondering about the red and whether it would bleed. I actually washed it before I stitched it at all, and then I washed the quilt before I sent it off. It had dragged on the ground, after all. Miracle of miracles, there was no bleeding in the finished quilt! 

 

So it's off to Mercyful Quilts for this quilt, with a prayer for the eventual recipient. I hope someone finds this very red and very soft quilt very cozy and comforting. 

Hope you all have a great weekend. I'm going to try to work on some rainbow scrap challenge projects this weekend and rest my brain a bit. My niece is also stopping by on her way home from vacation, so that will be fun too. I'm thinking there will be ice cream, which is always good, isn't it? And I've finished up more of the summer quilts, too, so more fun finishes are coming!

Sharing at Finished or not Friday, the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique, and the Positivity linkup at Needle and Foot.

Accidentally modern

 Hi all! Well, the summer travel is over for us. Sadness! We did have some great trips, and we have now seen both ends of US1, but the good times are over for now and it's back to the grind. I will say that nothing makes you appreciate your own home quite like traveling. Especially your own bed. Good-smelling sheets!

If you've been around the blog for a bit, you know that "modern" is not really my thing. All that empty space! Most modern quilts look unfinished to me, though I do admire many of them. What can I say? I love piecing. If you don't, you do you! 

 

A few years ago, I attempted to make a temperature quilt. I failed miserably. It felt so much like a chore, making a small block every day, no matter how simple it was. And then life happened and I put it off for a few days, and then another, and another. . .you get it. I had made a temperature scale, though, and I kept it after I abandoned the project. It has turned into this:

Okay, it's a little odd, but I like it! This is long and skinny, something like 42 by 60, so it isn't really a lap quilt. I think it's just an art piece that I'm planning to hang in my hallway. That's why it has such a cute quilting design.

That it turned out at all and didn't get thrown away was completely accidental, of course. I think I intended to cut it up and at least save the Kona white from the sides. I never did, and when I was prepping some other quilts for the longarm, I also saw this and decided to quilt it up. The quilting pattern turned out perfect for this piece, I think. It's Daisy Swirl from Clothwerx and I love how it turned out.

The backing is just a leftover piece from another backing. If you look really closely, you can see that it has a very pale pattern on the back so it won't show through to the front.  The binding was surprisingly hard to choose. It took quite some time before I settled on this multicolored polka dot fabric, which is subtle enough that it doesn't give the quilt a hard edge.

So there we are! An old mistake turned into a nice piece for my hallway. I should say that the ceilings in there are 9 feet high, so this will look like just the right size in the space.

Hope everyone has a really good weekend. I'm doing laundry and getting my big stack of books ready to carry back to school. Meetings start this coming week. Oh, boy-- aren't meetings everyone's favorite part?

Sharing at Finished or not Friday, Brag About Your Beauties, and the Patchwork and Quilts linkup at Quilting Patchwork Applique.

Orange and purple flock

 Hello all! So here we are at August, which means that the end of summer is coming faster than we think. In honor of that, while you are reading this, the hubster and I are off on our last summer adventure, to a place where the chances of rain are much lower than they are at home, so I'm hoping for blue skies and cool breezes.

 

Before we left I finished up the orange and purple birds for the rainbow scrap challenge, so here they all are together:

Yes, it is not a great picture! One of the poor birds is so embarrassed that she's hiding in the back. I tried to get a picture all together out in the tree, but that takes time to arrange, and it was about to rain, so I hurried a bit. The sky opened up right after this, so here is an indoor picture where you can see all the birds:

 

Birds in the house! A little boring, but at least you can see everyone. I love these birds, and I've had fun making them. I think I've got just about enough to put them together by now. I'll have to put them all up on the wall to see for sure, but it's very close.

The orange birds certainly look like a happy bunch, don't they? I made a mistake and made three of them facing the same way instead of only two, but I think they'll forgive me for it. I love the bright red beak on the one on the right! The beaks really give them some personality, don't you think?

Since we live in Baltimore, I had to make an orange bird that looked at least a little bit like a Baltimore oriole, too. Come to think of it, I should make a raven, too, shouldn't I? Strangely, I have not yet seen an oriole in person in Maryland, though I have seen some interesting birds, including the herons that like the stream that runs near our house. I think they're green herons, but I haven't looked them up yet. 

The purple birds are left over from last month, but they are a fairly festive bunch as well. Look at that wild plumage! These are not purple martins, that's for sure. A couple of these turned out smaller than intended because I cut them wrong, but I won't tell them that they're short if you don't.

And there are the birds! Hope you all are having a lovely last couple of weeks of summer and packing in all the fun you can. Hope you're in the sunshine with a nice cool drink, or at least in some air conditioning!

 

Oops! Updated to add that the birds are made using Lynne's Liberated Birds tutorial, which you can find right HERE. An excellent purchase for these very addictive birds!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC22.