Postcards for the #Kookypostcardsal2025

 I have been remiss in sharing the textile postcards I've been making this year. You may remember this one for January's Snow Day! prompt:

February's prompt was Feathered Friends. I'd recently acquired a vintage hankie featuring a pair of machine embroidered birds so I used them as a starting point for my postcard.

 The prompt for March was Time for Tea. I'm not a tea drinker. Tea time isn't really a thing here in the States either. (The prompt originator is a UK resident.) It wasn't until I came across some Dr. Who prints in my stash that I was finally able to come up with a plan for the March postcard.

I called this one Timey-wimey Tea with the Doctor. 😁

April's prompt is Secret Garden. If you're familiar with the book or the movies you will know about the garden brought back to life behind a hidden door. That was just a little too obvious for me but I didn't have any other ideas until a conversation with friends in a Zoom call. One of them spoke of how love grows in our hearts. Bingo!

Hmm, I should have photographed it on a different background. Oh well. Lately I've been scattering tiny upright crosses to give texture to background areas. I enjoy the process and like the results visually. This postcard also gave me an opportunity to use some really tiny heart buttons I acquired somewhere along the way. The prompt for May is Faerie Tales. I wonder where that prompt will take me!

Welcome Blanket Quilt

 I admit that I composed the layout for the Welcome Blanket in haste and not at the top of my game.This is what I put up for Scrap Happy Day:

Since then I have tweaked the block placements just a bit.

And today I have added the border that will finish at two inches, making the quilt top 40" square.

 

It's kind of busy but I think it works. Not only has this small quilt given me the opportunity to use blocks from the Parts Department and some scrap batting, I was able to use another remnant for the border strips. It's been fun to complete a quilt top so quickly. That's all kinds of success! 😁
 

Scrap Happy in April

In the middle of making all those Hourglass/Big Dipper blocks and flights of geese (see previous posts) I received an email from the Welcome Blanket Project. I've contributed to them in the past but it's been a while. They request blankets that are 40" square. I want to use the geese and the Hourglass blocks for a larger quilt but I have a quantity of 6" Shoo-fly blocks in the Parts Department. (I have even more Hole in the Barn Door blocks that size but I'm not willing to part with them at this point apparently.) I can put 36 of the Shoo-fly blocks together with a two inch border all the way around to make a 40" square quilt top. 

So I pulled out the blocks and auditioned them on the design wall. 

They still need to be sewn together and a border fabric chosen but this is a good start. 😊

Scrap Happy Day is hosted by Kate with the intention of giving us the opportunity to share something we've made out of scrap materials or have repurposed in some way. We show our work on the 15th of each month in our various time zones (Kate is in Australia and we have players all over the world). Click on the links below to see what everyone else has been up to.

Kate, Eva, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Tracy, Jan, 
Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, 
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Viv, Karrin,  Alissa,
Hannah and Maggie

 

Celebrating Spring

I follow Kate at the Last Homely House and the Last Homely Garden on YouTube. She just posted this charming video from her garden in the north of England. Enjoy!

Coming Up for Air

 Jinxxxygirl (Deb) has pointed out to me that it's been a while since my last post. She's right! I hadn't realized so much time has passed. I've been head-down in the scrap pile all this time. Well, except for the times I've been down with a headache or what have you. 

I developed a menu of sorts for attacking the larger scraps in the stash. I begin by cutting a 7.25" square that I cut diagonally twice for flying geese. If that print is also appropriate for backgrounds in the flying geese units I'll cut 3.875" half-square triangles. (I still use the methods I learned at the beginning of my quilting career.) That takes up about 16" of length. Then I cut two 5.25" squares for the 4" (finished) Hourglass units that become 8" Hourglass/Big Dipper blocks. Next I cut pieces for the Janet Kime cat blocks. On occasion I've been able to cut background pieces for 8" variable Star blocks or a 4.5" patch for the center of a star. To polish off the fabric I'll cut 2.875" HSTs and 2.5" squares or rectangles for 6" Shoo-fly or Hole in the Barn Door blocks and 2" wide bits for Lego blocks. All of these patches get set aside until there are enough to begin pairing up backgrounds and foregrounds. 

I have quite the flock of flying geese now. More than enough for another version of the Remixed Geese quilt pattern. However, I don't have a recent photo of them.

I should now have 46 of the Hourglass/Big Dipper blocks. I'm shooting for 63 for the quilt plan I have in mind.

 More than that will allow for some to be eliminated from the final layout. And, of course, the plan may change at any moment! 

 I have no idea how many stars there are in various bags and boxes in the Parts Department. The postage stamp stars are separate from the whole cloth center stars, and I even have a separate bag that holds the stars on white-on-white backgrounds. Sometimes organizing can be carried a step too far. 😉 

The pile of patches for cats is a bit intimidating. I've cut background patches, but not nearly enough for all of the cats. There's probably a whole other quilt in that pile. 

Scrap Happy Day is just around the corner. What I will have to share on the day?