Feelin' the Blues

Much has transpired since my last post. We made the difficult decision to send Luna over the rainbow bridge. We never knew just how old she was as she was a rescue from one of our local shelters. She'd been with us for about seven and a half years if my reckoning is accurate. The first time our vet saw her he guessed her to be about four years old. At a later visit he revised his opinion of her age, thinking she might have been a bit older. Between that, and no hope of the seizures abating, it just seemed the best thing for her. Needless to say, I have felt her absence keenly. It didn't help that her last trip to the vet was on the day before my birthday. Fortunately, my SIL sent me a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle as a birthday gift. I hadn't done any puzzles for a long time but I do enjoy them. This one was rather daunting.

The colors and the subject matter appealed to me, as my SIL knew they would. 🙂 Working on this provided just the distraction I needed in the days after Luna's passing.

I have also been sewing. The annual fundraising auction for our local hospice organization will be held in September. I figured there was time to get a quilt made to put into the auction and settled on a blue and white color scheme. I chose a block design I hadn't made previously - but it's only a slight variation on a Bear's Paw block. It's called Doves in my block book. So far I haven't found another name for it. 

I don't really see doves, but then, how many traditional pieced blocks actually represent the things they were named after?  My original plan was to make 16 blocks and sash and border them for a square quilt. 

However, when I finally had 16 blocks made I didn't have enough of the white-on-white fabric I'd been using for background patches to go that far. Also, there were a few blocks that didn't seem to fit in well with the others.

Even culling the collection to 12 blocks didn't leave me with enough of the WoW to put a frame around the flimsy.

I searched and searched for more of that specific print and finally found it through Amazon.com of all places. There was no information as to manufacturer or designer on the selvedges. I had to buy 108" wide backing fabric to get the print I wanted. This project will be set aside while I wait for that yardage to be delivered.

There are other projects and plans in the works as well. Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things and post here a little more frequently in future. Let me offer my apologies to one and all for not following up on your kind comments lately. I do appreciate it when you leave comments. I just don't often have the psychic energy to respond to them. 💙

Scrap Happy in June

 I don't have much to show for Scrap Happy Day. There was one block that didn't get used in the wedding quilt. It will go into the Parts Department for future use. There are probably plenty of Scrappy Trips blocks for a quilt top in inventory. I just have to recruit the energy to see which ones will play well together. While I was assembling the wedding quilt top I managed to get two Shoo-fly blocks sewn up out of scraps. By the way, the wedding quilt has been quilted and bound. I'll have to share it with you in the next post. 😊

My Scrappy Trips blocks finish at 15" and the Shoo-fly blocks will be 6" finished.

However, I have managed to make a couple of blocks for the current block drive for Covered in Love, completely out of my scrap patches.

These will make for truly interesting quilts. The idea is to use black patches through the center of each block and then graduate from the darkest shades of one color to white in the opposite corners. I had a bit of a struggle finding patches that made a gentle transition from white to the light value of any one color. I don't do pastels in general. Otherwise I might have made more of these!

You can see what everyone else has been doing with their scrap materials by clicking on the links below. Kate and Gun are the hostesses for this blog hop. If you'd like to be included in the future - we post on the 15th of each month in our respective time zones - just leave a comment on either of their blogs while you're there. 

Kate, Gun, Eva, Lynda, Susan Birthe, Turid, Cathy,  

Tracy, Jill,  Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys, 

Claire, Jean, Jon, Dawn, Jule, Gwen, 

Bekki, Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, 

Nanette, Ann, Dawn 2, Bear, Viv, 

Preeti, Edith, Debbierose, Carol

Done and Dusted

That project I've been working on behind the scenes has been quilted, bound, and received by the intended recipient. Even better, she was over the moon with the gift. 😁 

I'd been asked to make a quilt in the colors of the ocean to fit into a specific color scheme in a new house. A house I'd never been in I might add, due to my sensitivity issues. I chose to work strictly with batiks and used the Scrappy Trips technique from Bonnie Hunter (again!). Partly because it was this quilt of mine that inspired the request in the first place:

 

  Whereas my quilt has the look of the sun and its' rays moving through the quilt top I wanted this new one to look more like waves washing up on a beach. It wasn't too hard to get started but after the first few blocks I got stuck. It took almost four years to get unstuck! I had to just gird my loins and get back to making blocks without thinking too much about how they were going to be set to represent the image I was after. To get going again I decided to concentrate on making tan blocks for the beach and deep water blocks of the darkest blues. Then I just played with the various teals and lighter values for the transition blocks.

I ended up with that rather hard line of teal/blue at the bottom of the flimsy. Blocks were actually sewn into rows at that point. They had to be taken apart to soften that up. I also made an additional block using some of what I had left of the lighter value prints.

James had a chance to exercise a bit of creative freedom with the quilting of this one. Rather than an overall pattern he emphasized the movement of the water with his work.

I bound the quilt with the same batik I used on the back. It's another batik in various tans, beige, and brown that I think looks like debris on a beach.

Unfortunately, all the lovely quilting James did virtually disappeared in the laundering of the completed quilt. It created wonderful texture though.

And now the quilt is in its' new home, where it fits in perfectly according to reports!