More Snow?

The cottonwood tree seeds are blowing in the wind. Pretty soon our evergreen bushes will be covered in white. And this stuff doesn't melt! I use the windshield wipers on my car to remove pollen and other plant debris almost as much as I use it to clear raindrops!

Slowly, slowly I'm making progress with the friendship blocks. Discerning eyes may be able to see the differences between these shots and those in the last post. I have big chunks sewn together but still have some fine tuning to do as I assemble those chunks into the final quilt top.


Overall I'm pleased with how it's coming together. I am getting antsy to get it off the design wall, though, so I can play with something else. It's unusual for me to spend this much focused time and energy on one project. Normally I jump around between two or even three smaller projects.


I had a six inch hole to fill so I made this block using bits of a Project Runway print:

I've also been using up those patches I cut for Bow Tie blocks a while back as I've been working on this project. I'm going to have to cut some more before I go much further. (Guess that can be my other project for the time being...)

My most recent order from eQuilter.com arrived today. Nothing like buying presents for yourself!

All of these fabrics were on sale. I had to have the bright tropical print on top - someday there's going to be a quilt using that palette. The next three under it are for future preemie quilts. The green was another one I just had to have. The black is a possible border fabric for this friendship quilt.

I'm thinking I may have to start a new stack in my stash just for the prints I've been collecting for preemie quilts. My collecting is getting ahead of my creating ;- )

Happy, Happy Day!

But we'll get to that in a moment ;- )

I've made some progress with the friendship blocks. I was frankly freaking out about this project early in the day yesterday. I think part of the problem was that I didn't have a clear plan of attack. After working with the bits and pieces for a while I began to understand how it needed to be assembled. By the end of the day I was able to actually get some of the blocks and checkerboard units sewn together and now I feel much better about it. I'm pretty happy with the way it's looking so far.

As you look at these pictures keep in mind that the columns of blocks on the right side are hanging crooked. Consequently they overlap slightly, making it a bit of a challenge to gauge how they're going to look in the end. For example, I thought the Sunbonnet Sue block was the same size as the Spiderweb or Kaleidoscope block beneath it. In reality it's half an inch skinnier. Hmm...

I still have quite a bit of work to do but it may be hard to maintain momentum because of this:

My altered version of Gwen & Freddy's new book arrived late yesterday! Woohoo! I've already skimmed through it and am anxious to dig deeper. My sweet SIL did this for me, technically for my birthday in June. Hope she'll forgive me for opening my present early ;- )

Aww Sheet!

Since my last post the Flower Garden Shoo Fly top has been taken to the quilter. She expects to have it ready for me by the end of this week. I'll have the camera back then too so you'll get to see how I resolved the problem with the blocks that were not getting along together. In the meantime, I dedicated myself to using this holiday weekend to make some real progress on this set of friendship blocks:


I'm afraid to go back and see when I first posted this picture. Suffice to say that these blocks are all dated from 2002. They've not been on the sheet that long, but the sheet has been hanging in front of my studio closet doors for far too long! These are all friendship blocks that were made per my request. I asked my guild buddies to make a block of their choice (preferably a favorite pattern of theirs) but to restrict their color choices to black and white prints and hot pink. They were also supposed to keep the finished size of the blocks divisible by two. You know, 12" blocks or 10" blocks or 8 inches or 6 inches. I would even have accepted 4" blocks! As I have been working with these blocks I've discovered that I have a couple that would have finished at 7.5" or 9" (very few of them actually finish at the size they were intended to be - but I expected that). I knew there was a reason I kept putting off tackling this project ;- )

One of my friends made a simple double four-patch block. When I laid the blocks out on the sheet I decided to break that block into two units for the purpose of balancing out the two sides of the quilt top. You might be able to see that in the first picture. Eventually that led me to the decision to use checkerboards as the spacer units between the blocks. I really didn't want the blocks all mashed up side by side, but neither did I want more traditional sashing.

Shortly after I started working on this I knew I would have to move that sheet or those blocks somewhere, somehow. All that pinning and unpinning as I moved elements around was just too tedious to tolerate. My flannel design wall is not big enough to accommodate all of these blocks and I wasn't comfortable trying to work on this in blind sections as it were. I wasn't even sure the sheet would fit between the two doors at either end of what constitutes my design wall. As it turns out it does, but just barely. So I've hung the sheet over my design wall and now I can push the pins into the Styrofoam insulation board that's between the flannel and the wall itself, at least for the section I'm working on at the moment. Much better! I may even have this mostly together by the time the floral quilt comes home. (But don't hold your breath!)

And now I leave you with this little quilt in honor of those who gave their lives in the service of our country...

May their sacrifices never be forgotten.

Floral Shoo Fly

Here are eleven of the blocks I made to add to the 31 I already had for my floral Shoo Fly quilt top:


My blocks tended to be brighter and darker than those I started with. Which made it a real challenge to distribute values and colors evenly across the surface of the quilt. This didn't help either:

I did finally come up with a layout I could live with. There are places where I would make slight changes if I could but I'm more committed to including as many of the original blocks as possible. As it was I left three out of the top, and they were all made by someone else.

Once I had the blocks sewn together I discovered an issue I could not live with. Even as I was sewing the blocks together I thought I must have turned a couple the wrong way around. Did I really intend to put this yellow and this peach block side by side? Yuck! It hurts my eyes!

When I downloaded the pictures I'd taken I discovered what had happened. I was laying the blocks out on my bed, and even on that surface I was running out of room. To compensate I had overlapped the last couple of rows of blocks. The peachy block was barely visible amongst its' neighbors.

I let it rest overnight. Come morning I knew I would have to do something to correct the situation. The peach block had been made by someone else so I chose to remove the yellow block. I felt very fortunate to find a softer yellow floral print in my stash that was absolutely perfect. I don't have a lot of floral prints to begin with, and finding the right color to slide into that hole quadrupled the challenge. You'll have to wait to see the change because I don't have access to the camera at the moment. Trust me, it's a big improvement. :- )

Second Toy Drop

Here's the little ball I made for The Toy Society:


And another view:

I used to make these balls for my own children some 20 years ago. The patches for this ball were still in my stash from way back then. The fabric is that polyester sort-of-flannel stuff they make for children's sleepwear. I must have cut the pieces just right because this ball turned out almost perfectly round. If you cut them going the wrong way on the grain of woven fabrics they sometimes come out kind of wonky. Too bad I don't remember which is the right way! (Of course I didn't mark it on my pattern piece.)

I left this toy near the front door of a health clinic in my own town on my way back from delivering the Foodie Quilt. Stopping at the dentist's office for the first drop gave me the idea to leave the ball here. I'd never been to this particular building before so I didn't know what I would find in terms of places to leave the toy. There wasn't much of an entrance. As you can see, I ended up tying it up in a young tree. It will at least be more visible than the dog I left on the backside of the statue.

I could see one of the clients in the clinic watching me through the narrow window when I took this picture so I'm pretty confident this toy will have been taken to a new home by now.

:- )