Scrappy green things

Hello and happy Saturday, everyone! I hope it's going well for you.  I don't know what you're doing this weekend,  but I bought a bunch of fabric yesterday and now I'm anxiously awaiting its arrival at my house.  I don't think any of it was green, but I'm always surprised when I open the packages, so it could be!

This is the last Saturday of March (yikes!), so today I've got a small roundup of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects.  I already showed off the green Cut Glass Dish blocks, so today let's start with the Boston Common quilt:

Well, that looks happy! If you recall, I'm putting a round of squares onto this quilt top each month in the color of the month.  I still have not had to cut any new squares, just pull them out of the 2-1/2 inch square bin.  It makes me happy to use those babies up!  Some of them have been hanging around for a long time. I think in April there will be one more round, then I'll add another round of white squares, just as a design element.  I know I won't be using a brown or black round unless they're the very last one, so the white squares will add a bit of size to the quilt, too.

Next up are the Tiny Tuesday blocks:

I didn't know if I'd like tiny blocks, but I certainly do! I didn't make the umbrella, but I did make a couple of extra blocks to make my quilt bigger.  And of course I made the owl:

You can see that my owl is sleeping.  He must be tired. Actually, I couldn't find anything for eyes, so I just made closed eyes.  And I was going to make him green or brown, but I'm glad I went ahead with the green instead.

Finally, I also made six green string sections for the Scrap Happy Rails quilt:

I have to say, when I started this project I was worried about how strings in all one color would look.  Wouldn't that be awfully flat?  Turns out it's not, and I'm really glad.  Once again I didn't have to cut any new strings, and I even had a few left over.  It sure doesn't look like there are that many in the jar, but somehow they magically keep multiplying.

I initially tried to take the picture of the string sections outside, but I think the camera is going.  I did manage to get this one, which shows the colors nicely:

And that is the end of the green projects! I'm happy with my progress, and I hope you're happy with your progress, too. Have a nice, restful weekend before we tackle the next color!

See what I mean?

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC19.

Jack and Jill

Hi everyone! Is it really the end of March? That must have happened when I wasn't looking. To be fair, this has been a hard month and I haven't been looking at a lot of things.  This week I finally wound up a very large, important project that has taken up a great deal of my time the past few months. I spent a day this week at another school out of state and gave *two* high stakes presentations on the same day.  It went well, and I am happy to have that behind me.  Maybe now I can focus on important things, like the best color to use with orange in a quilt.

I was so busy and then mentally used up this week that I didn't think I'd have a finish, but it turns out I have two! Here they are:

These are two baby quilts that I've been calling "Jack and Jill."  They are just about 35-1/2 inches square and are intended as donations to Jack's Basket through Sarah's Hands to Help challenge at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

These two little quilts are adapted from the infamous 'Quick Strippie" pattern at Mary Quilts. (You can find the free pattern HERE.)  I just made the pattern a bit smaller.  Mary is an absolute genius, because I cut these fabrics on Sunday before I got on the road, then stitched up one after I got back on Wednesday and one on Thursday.  I don't think it took even three hours to make up both of these.  Not difficult at all!

Both of these are made from about a half yard of some leftover fabrics.  The pink quilt uses up most of what I had left of some fabric I had originally purchased for a quilt backing.  I used it as a backing, but still had a couple yards left over and it's been here forever.  It's a hard print to use but works great here.

I still think the fabric is really pretty but I'm really happy to see it used up and in a happy little baby quilt.

The blue quilt uses a piece that I bought for a baby quilt, but never used because I made something else instead.  The fabric has all kinds of construction equipment, and the coordinating piece is nuts and bolts. Perfect for a baby boy.

I'm also glad to use up these two pieces!  The only real use for them is a baby quilt, don't you think?

I will quilt these up in a little bit.  Since they're strip quilts, I plan to just do straight line quilting on them.  I'm actually planning to quilt all of the donation quilts at once after I have them all finished.  I have one more to do and then that will be it for this year.

When I went out to take pictures of these little quilts, I found some happy little flowers poking through the dead leaves under the trees:

Those are some purple crocus, and I don't know if you can see these very well, but they are grape hyacinths:

I didn't plant any of these, but they make me happy!

For this weekend I'm planning to rest up and read some quilty blogs and then maybe buy a bunch of fabric.  I have some serious shelf space to fill!  Apparently I've been using fabric and not replacing it with more, so there are some gaps. Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Sharing at Finished or Not Friday, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, TGIFF, and Brag About Your Beauties.

Finished paneling

Hi everyone, and welcome to another weekend! I don't know about you, but I sure could use it.  It's been a very busy week around here.  Lots and lots going on behind the scenes!  Nothing quilt-related, just family and work stuff, and some of it not fun, but it certainly kept me running. Thankfully, I did have a major distraction that turned into this week's finished quilt top.  It's nice when that happens, isn't it?

Do you ever get a project in your head and for some reason it just captures your imagination and you just have to work on it, even when you have much more pressing things to do?  That's what happened to me with this project.  Sandra over at mmmquilts calls these projects "squirrels" that cause Dreami moments-- when you just have to drop everything and make it.  (You can find out more at Sandra's blog HERE.) Here is my squirrel:

Yay, a finished quilt top! This top started out as a panel that I pulled out to make into a donation quilt.  I had some yardage from the same line of fabric and now I've used up the panel, the coordinating yardage, a small brown piece, and some beige that's in the hourglass blocks.  Let's hear it for moving out old fabrics and making room for some new stuff!

This quilt looks so simple, and it is, but I'll tell you-- I could not stop thinking about it all week.  I even doodled some block layouts and alternate blocks when I should not have been doodling.  Then I went into the sewing room and tried a bunch of things.  Given the way it turned out, I think that was okay, but it was a little weird that it was taking up so much mental space. In the end it went together pretty easily.  You save a lot of time if you're not piecing blocks!

I cut the panel into 9-1/2 inch blocks, then added 1-inch red frames that finished at just a half inch around each of those.  The alternate blocks are simple hourglass blocks that are turned every row to make faux frames for the panel blocks.  Each of the blocks finishes at 10 inches, and the top is about 58 by 68. I had just enough of the green in the hourglass blocks to squeak those out, and I also used up all but about an 8 inch strip of the red border.  I divided the length of red I had to determine the width of the final border, so it ended up at about 3 inches wide, which feels a little narrow to me, but it did use up that red fabric.

In case you haven't noticed, we are stuck with indoor pictures.  This week was mostly sunny and warmish, and then I went to take pictures. Yeah, it rained and rained. I was going to brave it when it was only drizzling, but the ground was really saturated.  It's very wet out there! The indoor pictures didn't turn out toooo badly, but maybe I can get some outside on Friday and replace these. UPDATED TO ADD-- I did get some new pictures and have replaced some of them. Still very squishy outside!

Now that it's out of my head, this quilt is destined for donation to Mercy Hospital through Hands to Help. I was hoping that this would be fairly gender neutral, and looking at it now I'm not so sure.  It's feels pretty woodsy, but there are a lot of flowers in it. Perhaps I'll have to try again with another quilt. I don't have one in my head yet, but I'm pretty sure if I look around I'll find a few doodled ideas!

Finally, here's a picture that I took on campus on one of our sunny days this week:

Tulips blooming! Doesn't that just make your heart sing?

Hope everyone has a good weekend filled with signs of spring! I have lots on the agenda, including a date with some lemon bars and maybe a bit of painting.  If it rains, I guess I'm stuck with just the lemon bars, so I'm not sure whether I'm hoping for rain or not!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, Brag about Your Beauties, and probably Sandra's Dreami link party.

Spring greens

Hi everyone, and happy Saturday! Well, I had big plans for this week, but it didn't quite work out like I expected.  We had a turn in the weather and I was lured outside for a bit, and then I actually did some yard work! Mostly it was picking up sticks (where do they all come from?) and raking some leaves, but it felt *great.*  Then when I came inside I looked around and realized that the house needed some serious cleaning, so I opened the windows and scrubbed some baseboards and touched up some paint.  Do you ever get that feeling in the spring? It definitely feels much cleaner and nicer now.

All of this meant that I did not finish quilting a quilt this week, and in fact I only finished the green Cut Glass Dish blocks:

If you recall, these blocks are one of my projects for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this year.  I love how they look, especially the zippy green one on the left.  Next month I promise to take a picture of all the blocks I've made so far because all of the colors look great together.

And that was it!  I did one other thing using green fabric, though it isn't as much a scrap project as a "using things up" project.  I made some test blocks to use as alternate blocks for a panel I cut apart:

These are actually simple hourglass blocks, using a dark green print and a beige print.  I'm going back and forth on whether the green is too dark or not, and also whether the green print is too busy.  I have just enough of the green to make the alternate blocks, and then I thought about using a small beige border and maybe a red binding.  I actually might have another little bit of dark green for a binding if I like that better.  This would use up the panel, the dark green, the beige, and maybe another bit of dark green or red.  Plus it makes a nice comfort quilt to donate, too!

That's all for my green projects this week, but there is one more green thing to share:

Daffodil shoots!  This makes me so happy.  Spring will really be coming soon!

Hope everyone has a great weekend! The temperatures will be falling again, but I plan to enjoy it while it lasts!

Sharing at soscrappy for RSC19.