The stitching of the greens

(For anyone interested, the monthly scraps giveaway is at the end of this post!)

Wow, March is pretty much over!  How did that happen?  No idea, but since we're at the end of the month, it's time to show off some of my RSC progress for March.  This time around it was light and bright greens, which was certainly appreciated because I am so ready for some greenery in the form of spring flowers and actual leaves on the trees.  There are a few buds, but no leaves just yet.  Just look at the backgrounds of my pictures!

One of my RSC projects for this year is the patchwork scrap stars.  Here are this month's green ones:

As you can see, I made one that's the lighter green and one that's brighter, with a purple star and an aqua star.  Usually these are made with white stars, but I thought that would be too boring for me.  I like how these are turning out.  Here's the lot of them so far:

Aren't those festive?  Imagine how they're going to look once we add in some warmer colors!

Another one of my projects is making these scrappy 9-patches to use up some of my treasure trove of 2-inch squares:

These are so easy to make and go so fast.  I made 8 of them this month, which gives me 45 all together:

I think these look great together, and I really am glad that I made them all with white centers.  Once we get through the year, I'm going to make these into some donation quilts, probably using Bonnie Hunter's free pattern for dancing 9-patches.  I'm hoping to have enough for two quilts, so I'll need a bunch more.  Good thing there's a bunch of colors left!

So, those and my Clay's Choice stars are the blocks that I managed to make from what I pulled out of the scrap bin this month.  I also dug deep and cut up all the green pieces for my version of Bonnie Hunter's En Provence quilt:

Most of those are somewhat darker than the other scraps, more medium greens than lighter ones, but I did manage to pull most of them from the "light green" bin.  And now they'll be used in a nice, happy quilt, so it won't matter what we call them.

So now that the greens are done for this month, as I promised at the beginning of the year, I am giving away what remains in the light green bin at no charge at all to one lucky winner:

Since I used up a lot of the greens, and because there are some small pieces here, I'm also including some 2-1/2 inch strips that are kinda green, along with an unopened spool of white Craftsy thread and the usual handfuls of 2-inch and 1-1/2 inch squares.  I don't know anything about the thread, but they sent it to me with another thread order, as a sample, I guess.  I almost never use white thread, and I have plenty, so it will go to whoever takes these remaining scraps off my hands.

This giveaway is now closed!  Thanks all!

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post!  Really, that's all! Since this is a holiday weekend for many people, I will use the random number generator thingy sometime on Tuesday morning, April 3. Of course, if you want to leave a comment without entering the giveaway, you absolutely can.  Just let me know to leave you out! And if you are no-reply, please remember to leave a way to reach you.  If I can't reach you, you can't win!

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend. We will be celebrating Easter, and many of our friends will be having Passover Seders.  I certainly wish you a blessed time if you're celebrating either one, and if you're not, have a lovely weekend as well!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and soscrappy for RSC18.

Block parts everywhere

Hi all! If any of you are familiar with Sandra's blog, mmm quilts!, you may have heard of Dreami moments (Sandra explains it really well HERE.) Dreami stands for "drop everything and make it," which pretty much describes the end of my quilt-making process.  I usually work on the quilt a bit at a time until I just have to make that final push to finish it.  I've been having on of those moments this week, though there is probably zero chance that I'll actually finish this quilt right now.

For the last few days I've felt like working on Bonnie Hunter's En Provence quilt, which I started a long time ago. I finished cutting all the green pieces for the quilt and was just seized with a major desire to make some blocks. Cutting green pieces doesn't seem like much progress! So I cut some more yellow pieces and made a couple of the blocks:

Okay, I know that the purple 4-patches are wrong. Somewhere between the design wall and the machine they got turned around. I don't know how that happened.  But it's one block made for the quilt, so that's a good thing!  Progress!  (For those of you who have made this quilt, I switched the greens and yellows so that I would end up with yellow stars instead of green ones.)

I was so happy to have a couple of blocks done that I cut the rest of the yellow parts and started making the units that use those, and then it was time to use the pink triangle squares to make some sashing.  Turns out I hadn't squared those up yet, so I spent a bunch of time sliver trimming.  After I did a few dozen of those, I made another block, then trimmed some more, then made another block. You get the picture.

There are a *lot* of parts to this quilt, so there are currently block parts everywhere, like a quilt exploded or something.  It's messy, but fun.  And I'm making progress a little at a time, so I can put up with a little mess.  For a little while, anyway! 

Hope everyone is having a good week and making lots of progress.  If you have a few minutes, head over to Preeti's blog to check out the fundraising and giveaways that she is having.  Your heart will be warmed! And while you're there, I'm pretty sure there will be some elves that come along to clean up that sewing mess. I hope so, anyway!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

Mountains, baby!

Well, that was an exciting week, wasn't it?  We had a big spring snow storm and virtually no work got done by anyone all week, except by the snow plow drivers and the guys with chain saws who spent quite a bit of time cutting up the massive tree that fell down across my neighbor's driveway.  We lost a few branches, but nothing that required a chain saw, thank goodness.

We all know that a snow day is a free day, right?  So instead of working on real things that I need to get done for my real life, I used the whole day to finish a baby quilt for my friend's first grandson. His parents chose mountains, along with navy, gray, and aqua for him, which was quite the challenge.  I'm afraid there is no aqua in this quilt, but I think I got the style and tone right. Here's how it finally worked out:

How better to photograph a mountains quilt than against the snow? Of course the day after the storm it was bright and perfect outside when I wanted to take pictures, so I had to wait until later in the evening to get photos that weren't totally bleached out.All that snow was pretty blinding!

Except for the center panel with the mountains, this is nothing like I started with. It was lovely to have time to work on it and try things, rip them out, and try something else until I felt like I got it right.  I ended up deciding that piecing of any kind would distract from the mountains, so I just used graduated strips of color, with grays on the bottom and blues on top.

This quilt turned out to be just about 40 by 48, almost exactly where I wanted it to be.  I think that will be a nice size for a tiny boy and still be good when he's a little bigger.  I quilted it with organic lines that were not straight but not curved, either.  These are easy enough in theory, but it's hard to get them to look consistently graceful.  It was a nice couple of hours while I listened to the plows and the wind.

For the backing I used a pretty blue called Prism by P and B Textiles.  It made a nice complement to the colors on the front.  The binding is Kona Celestial.  I was going to use navy but it looked pretty harsh.  This one is just a little bit softer which made it perfect for this project.  And because I like things all blendy, I used a perfectly matching blue thread in the bobbin and 8 different colors of thread in the top. To match the different colors, you know?

When you give a baby quilt, do you wash it first?  I washed this one, then I ironed it so that it will look "new" when little Otto's parents take it out of the box.  Is that weird? Whether it is or not, this little quilt is on its way to its new owner, who is still pretty new himself.  I'm so happy to have this done, and so happy for my friend, because being a grandma is pretty much the best thing ever.  I know this little guy will bring them all so much happiness.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.  Our snow is pretty well melted (since it was 50 degrees today) and I have some fun plans for the weekend.  It's my daughter's birthday, so we'll get to see her, and I'm hopeful that there will be some celebrating.  I can't have cake any more (gluten, bah!) but you know what *is* gluten free?  Most wine.  True fact!  I'll test some for you just to be sure!

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

Making a mountain

Hey, it's yet another snow day here! What is happening to our weather?  It has snowed more since mid February than it did all of the winter previous to that and we are in line for some serious snow the next few days.  So, yes, pretty much everyone has a snow day today.  Our homeowner's association even sent out a message that they wouldn't be able to pull people out of ditches in the snow, so everybody stay home and don't bother us. Really!

Since it's a snow day, I am hoping to finish off a special baby quilt before Friday.  One of my very best friends just became a grandma for the first time! Her grandson is really cute and obviously he needs a special baby quilt.  His mom and dad chose mountains and the colors gray, navy, and aqua for him, so of course I want to combine all of those for his quilt.  Here's where I am:

That's the most important part of the quilt, the mountains.  I think they look okay, don't you? And of course there is a lot of gray in there, even in the green at the bottom.

The mountain panel is pretty big, about 24 by 40, but the quilt needs to be bigger.  I want it to be about 40 by 50, and I want to incorporate some other colors.  I thought about just putting a light gray at the top and a darker gray at the bottom, but that's a little sedate for a baby, don't you think?  So I tried using some aqua and green tumblers, along with some gray ones, at the bottom:

Hmmm.  That's not good at all. I thought I would use some light blues along with the grays for the upper part, but now I'm not sure what to do.  Maybe strips instead?  Dark grays at the bottom, lighter ones at the top?  Four patches? Anyone have any other ideas?  All I know for sure is that I'm using navy for the binding.

Well, I'm sure I'll figure it out.  Half the point of experiments is to figure out what doesn't work, right? I just want it to be  really nice for the tiny boy and his folks and grand-folks.  I have the back and the batting all basted and am ready to quilt this just as soon as I figure out the front, and with a snow day I should get it worked out really soon.  I also made these baby blankets for the little man, which are supposed to coordinate with his quilt:

Those are really cute, aren't they? I was surprised by how many different grays there were to choose from in the baby section of the flannels.  Who knew?

Hope everyone stays safe in the different weather events happening right now.  Before I head back to the sewing room, I need to ask you all to head over to Preeti's blog (right HERE) for a very important post.  She's hosting a fundraiser for a special little boy and offering some prizes for participation. There are also pretty quilty pictures, but the story will really touch your heart, so be sure to hop over and read it and consider donating.

Of course, if you have good ideas about the mountains quilt, send them along!  Otherwise, stay safe!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social.