Baby Quilt progress

Last year I started to make stars for the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge, but was sidetracked along the way. Then I saw the Friendship Star Variation at Cathy's Crazy by Design. So I added the triangles to the outer borders...and got something else entirely...because my stars were different. Oh well. I will make another stab at hers another time. In the meantime, this top is ready to be layered and quilted and then sent to my sister to join her baby donation quilts.

This is another donation baby quilt that I finished binding today. The tutorial for making a quilt like this can be found at Kitchen Table Quilting.

Stonefields continues

I finished two more blocks for the Stonefields quilt by Susan Smith.

Here is the other one.

The instructions called for three of these blocks.

And here's Buddy. He continues to grow. He now acts like a large dog who thinks he's a lap dog that outgrew the lap months ago.

Teal chicken, spools, pinwheels

Yes, it's the last Saturday for teal at the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge.  Since its the beginning of the year, I still don't have a firm grasp on my RSC projects for this year. I made a teal chicken although I'm not certain I'm going to follow through with a chicken quilt. Maybe I will just throw all the barnyard animals together and let them fight it out.

Here are the blue-green/green-blue spools.

And although I started the month with these pinwheel blocks, I made more.


Meanwhile, the daffodils are celebrating spring. To honor their arrival, we had a thunderstorm pass through that flattened them to the ground.

MidAtlantic Quilt Festival 2017

Today I spent the day at the MidAtlantic Quilt Festival. This paint splattered cat fabric was my favorite find. It's by Timeless Treasures and is named Cat.

I also found this bat fabric (Happy Haunting by Beth Logan for Alvyn.) I bought it to celebrate the bat that was loose in the house over the Christmas Holidays.

And speaking of eating bats, here's Buddy a year ago. Here he has settled in after his failed adoption at the local shelter, but just a few days before his successful adoption by Molly.

And last but not least, here is a Dear Jane quilt that was in today's show. It was made by a new quilter from Portland, Oregon (Christine Jiun Yi). The use of colors are quite amazing given the low contrast fabrics.

Yellow and green checkerboard

The binding is on the yellow and green checkerboard, so let's call it a finish.

You're welcome.

Two more blocks

Here's another Stonefields block. Now I have two versions of this block.

And here's another Stonefields block. The instructions call for three versions of this block.  I went a bit lively for this one.

And here's Molly helping me sew the binding on the yellow and green checkerboard quilt.

Another Stonefield block

Here's the most recent addition to the Stonefields quilt (by Susan Smith).

And here is my progress so far.

And as I was assembling the blocks, Molly was trying to launch a sneak attack. Here she is looking quite nonchalant. As you can see, the design wall is showing the stress from her regular ascents. But you can also see that it has a simple construction using PVC pipe, bungee cords and flannel.

Teal Lion

Here's a teal lion to add to the pride. And yes, he is very proud to join the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge's February celebration of blue-green or green-blue.

And I'm sure that some of you might be a bit alarmed about lions living in the same sewing room as the sheep.

But no worries. Given the sheep are wearing their winter coats, they are much larger than the lions, so the lions keep a respectful distance.

Baby quilt and Stonefield

Here's a second baby quilt waiting for its binding.

And the Stonefield star block is finished. It has a lot of layers. I cut away some of the extra fabric, but there is still quite a fabric mountain left with this piling on applique technique.

And here is the pink sunrise that greeted us this morning.

Checkerboards and Snowballs

Here is the green and yellow checkerboard quilt. Yes, layered and quilted in one day.

Here is the quilt back.

I know you are wondering how I could get so much done given how meticulous my quilting assistant is. Well...we're having a new roof put on the house and apparently that much noise causes quilting assistants to hide. At least for the morning. Buddy stays hidden all day, but Molly has become more brave and comes out at noon.

I will let you decide what she thinks is worse...the roofers or my willingness to engage in unsupervised quilting activities.

I also used Molly's absence to get a full shot of my grandmother's snowball quilt.

Here's a close-up.

And here are the red fabrics in the quilt. The fabric in the lower right hand corner is a bit different than the rest...a slightly heavier fabric and a beige background.  It seems like it might have been used for home decoration although it is more lightweight than what would be used today.

More Stonefields

Today was a Stonefields quilt kind of day. I cut my base block a bit larger than necessary before sewing the layers of applique on top.  I will cut the base down to the correct size later.

In many cases, Susan Smith's instructions call for multiples of the same block. In this case I made one that was cute and another one designed to lay back and fade away. Not everyone gets to be a star.

And speaking of stars...most of the blocks in the Stonefields quilt are made from stacking simple shapes on top of each other. This one stacks circles and stars.

 Molly prefers more sophisticated shapes with a feline nature that suggests curiosity and questioning authority.

En Provence Finale

Here is my version of Bonnie Hunter's wonderful 2016 mystery challenge En Provence.

Of course, one of Bonnie's key requirements for fabric selection was the inclusion of cat fabrics.

I will expect extra credit for including TWO cat fabrics.

But Molly expects to win the GRAND PRIZE for "best creative use of the En Provence quilt top." 

Slow and Fast

I really liked the 16 patch rainbow quilt that Cathy at  Crazy at Design made. I had lots of 2.5 inch squares in rainbow colors cut for another project, so I stole some of them to make this baby quilt (40 by 40 inches). And so I'm linking to Oh Scrap, so you can leap over there if you would like to see other scrappy projects.

I also appliqued the mini hexagon units to their patchwork block for the Stonefields quilt by Susan Smith.

There were two of them. These were my little bits of slow stitching and so I am linking to Kathy's Slow Sewing Sunday.   Walk over to enjoy other wonderful hand sewing projects.

Turquoise sheep

Although we are minutes from Valentine's day, we are celebrating blue-green and green-blue all February for the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge. This turquoise sheep had no problem dressing for both occasions.

And yesterday I finished the hexagon units that I need for my next Stonefields quilt blocks. They have a finished height of two inches and will be appliqued to a pieced block.

Hexagons

The Pigs in a Blanket quilt has been sent off to the MidAtlantic Quilt Festival, so now its time to do something besides the finishing touches on that quilt. I have been feeling a bit intimidated by the next step in the Stonefields quilt, so I decided to push forward on that.

As you can see from the photo, the instructions call for two simple flower sets from hexagons where the finished size of each hexagon is just a tad over 1/2 inch. The quilt instructions come with a set of those tiny paper hexagons neatly packaged in a plastic bag and taped to the instructions. Of course, Molly helped me by stepping on the bag and getting the bits of tape on her back paw. With much vigorous shaking, she not only got the bag off her foot, but also scattered the tiny paper pieces all over the floor.

I did fussy cut hexagons from novelty fabrics so I could feature tiny creatures. One set features pigs, parakeets and a rabbit. The Other has a bunny, sheep, a camel, an elephant and a clown.

Molly and the Snowball quilt

Molly is dismayed that inappropriate kitten pictures were published without authorization in yesterday's blog.

To prevent such illegal behavior, she has destroyed an offending conduit. This is the second keyboard she has punished.

Oops. This might be another unauthorized photo.

This is an official photo of Molly. It shows her hard at work.

And here is a wider view of the Snowball quilt that my grandmother made. This quilt was made for my aunt Sally (her daughter) and includes some of her childhood dress scraps.

Some of the fabrics, like the one above, look a bit more worn and faded than others. So I'm guessing that this is one of the dress fabrics.

 This is another fabric that I suspect was a dress fabric.

This is the weirdest fabric and I suspect it comes from a flour or sugar sack.

And I love this little novelty fabric. Well, at first I loved it because of the cat playing the violin. But then Molly pointed out that the cat's feet are deformed and that made me feel rather sad. But this definitely looks like many of the available reproduction fabrics.