Day Three

First of all, let me show you the finished flimsy for Debra's Smokin' Hot Quilt Challenge (see previous post):

The photo's a tad off kilter. Trust me, it was the photographer, not the quilt! There's a straight picture in my husband's camera. ;- ) Hopefully when you double click on the photo you'll get a bigger image. I'm pretty happy with the end product, especially given that I had to design it in quarters. I really like the fact that the Scrappy Trip section will fill the top of the bed and the borders will fall on either side.

There are no other major quilt projects on the docket at the moment so the next day I took the opportunity to make our kitchen a couple of new potholders:

Over the years I've made seasonal pairs. For some time I've felt I needed something cheerful to follow the Christmas potholders. The next holiday set I have are Easter themed, and then I have some I put up for the summer months. Now I feel like I have the whole year covered - although I'll probably always make at least one new pair every year, just because.

Now to backtrack a little, I began work on my January bead journal project a few weeks ago. I'm not going to share that story at this time. Suffice to say that I was thinking about using some yarn I have to make a tassel for my BJP. It was a skein I no doubt bought from a clearance bin at some point. I might have cut a bit off to use in another project but essentially the ball was untouched. However, it had been bounced around in my yarn drawer for some time. When I pulled it out it had become more of a tangle than a ball of yarn. I've spent the last three days untangling that mess and winding the strands onto cards to keep them from becoming such a mess again.

Imagine the rat's nest in the middle of the picture above as three times larger than it appears. That might be an accurate reflection of the job I faced. I tried very hard not to break or have to cut the thread but inevitably it had to be done. Oddly enough, when I did cut it I ended up with three loose ends not two or four! It wasn't until late yesterday that I found the other end of one of those strands and was able to connect two of the four.

This is what that one skein of yarn turned into:

And I'm not even sure I'm going to use it for the tassel after all. Although after all this I almost have to just because it has become so much a part of my experience of this January!

Parts and Pieces

I've been making Scrappy Trip blocks out of the 2.5" strips that had accumulated here in the Magpie's Nest. My goal was to make 24 blocks to create a panel 36" x 96" for the quilt I'm making for Debra's Smokin' Hot Quilt Challenge. About half way through I had them on the wall like this:

Then it occurred to me that since this was going to be a vertically oriented design I might be better off making my 'waves' vertical rather than horizontal....

And then of course there was much rearranging of blocks to distribute prints and values as evenly as possible. This central panel had to be created in two sections, the upper half and the lower half, due to the size constraints of my design wall.

I have no idea which of these pictures is which at this point!

The next step was to use the string blocks I showed you in my last post to create columns to go on either side of this central panel. Originally I thought there would be four columns, 6" wide each, separated by a narrow sash. I really wasn't excited by the prospect of dealing with that narrow sash however. That's when I had the bright idea to mash four blocks together in a four patch arrangement like this (it's fuzzy because it's a re-crop of a cropped photo):

So the upper left column now looks like this:

And the upper right column like this:

I think.

I have the lower halves of the columns sewn up too. Hopefully these are the pictures I want; I'm getting confused!

I have some new yardage to use between these three columns (strings - scrappy trips - strings) and as outer borders. It looks to me like a reproduction of a Civil War era print, a nice dark blue that I think will help to calm the chaos of all these older prints. My goal today is to get these sections assembled and at least cut the strips for the sashing and borders. Once that's done I'll have to get help to get a picture of the finished product for you. And I'll be ready for a SMALL project by then!

 

 

As The Saying Goes...

I'm a day late and a dollar short again! I've been sewing up a storm this past week, with a Scrappy Saturday post as my goal, but got knocked down before I could get the post created. Oh well. Better late than never, as another saying goes. ;- )

There were some black remnants leftover from the Amish style blocks I showed in the previous post. I decided to stack them with other remnants to make quick string blocks. I cut them about 7 x 9 inches, stacked five layers, cut through them all, shuffled the pieces and reassembled the blocks.

Before pressing and trimming:

And after:

They were all trimmed to 6.5" square. Here's a sampling of those blocks:

I made up 65 blocks in a matter of a couple of days using this method!

Then I turned my attention to the 2.5" strips that had been accumulating. Scrappy Trips was a fairly straightforward choice. My intention was to leave the blocks truly scrappy but almost without thinking I found myself organizing the patches so that the darkest value in each set ran diagonally through the middle of the block. Here are the first eight:

Yesterday I made nine more blocks:

My current plan calls for 24 of these 12" blocks somehow alternating with the string blocks for a vertically oriented strip quilt. There are a few more Scrappy Trips to make and then I can start playing around with the overall layout. This will have to be one of those quilts that gets created by halves or quarters since the whole thing will not fit on my design wall at one time. That will make achieving balance between the prints more challenging but it's the challenge that makes the project fun. :- )

An Ending and A Potential Beginning

This is the reason I didn't commit to full participation in Scrappy Saturdays: I cut patches from scraps in the days leading up to Saturday and then Saturday I ended up finishing the binding on the latest set of placemats for my daughter instead of sewing scraps!

Here are the placemats:

Everything from peppermints and candy canes to Valentine's Day hearts and ribbons. :- )  I used the sewing machine to apply and sew down the bindings. On the very first placemat I forgot to work from the back to the front (the one right above) which, of course, was the one placemat with decidedly red or white strips at the perimeters. No matter what color thread I used it was going to show. Oh well. Finished is better than perfect. That was the mantra that got me through to the end of this project.

Leading up to Scrappy Saturday I cut patches and strips from some of the remnants laying around. These two stacks represent patches for 25 six inch blocks:

I've been using binder clips to keep my strips organized. The strips had outgrown the number of clips I had available however. A trip to Office Depot remedied that, although not without consequences to my well being.

I now have each strip width designated by a different color binder clip. The strips are also sorted by length, and in some cases also by value. There are so many 2.5" strips I ended up using two values of clips as well, light and dark blue! (The lighter clips hold shorter strips.)

I have several ideas percolating to get these strips used up. In the meantime, while I was recovering from my shopping trip I sewed up many of those scrap-patch blocks:

This morning I had an idea for incorporating these Amish style blocks into a top for Debra Spinic's new Smokin' Hot Quilt Challenge. We'll have to wait and see how that idea pans out... ;- )

Finishing Christmas

Well, getting closer anyway!

I had just enough of a headache the other day to make it possible to do work I find tedious but not mentally challenging. That means I put the sashing strips between the Churn Dash blocks for the side borders of the Christmas flimsy I've had on the design wall for weeks.

I thought I would be using a white with gold speckles around the Churn Dash blocks but there wasn't enough of it as it turned out. So I ran a narrow strip of that white vertically down the sides of the central part of the flimsy and then used a new beige paisley print with several values in it between the Churn Dash blocks and down the outside edges. The 12" sampler blocks were then sewn together to create top and bottom borders.

The paisley print worked very well to transition between the white parts of the quilt and those that are ecru based. I was very worried about a ripple in the lower half of the flimsy. Careful measuring made it possible to corral that, much to my delight. I am surprised - more accurately, thrilled - with  how well this turned out in the end!

The other bit of Christmas that I need to finish up is the set of six placemats for my daughter's table. I've finally framed up all the focal bits with the polar bears:

Here are all six tops:

Now it's time to do the quilting and get them bound. This is what I've chosen for the binding:

The quilting will be simple stitch in the ditch for the most part. Someone else could no doubt do something wonderful with free motion quilting - snowflakes come to mind - but I'm sticking with what I know so the mats will get finished sooner rather than later!