Sister's Choice Quilts

Sewcialites Week 5 and a Fun Notion

I've been having fun with the 2022 Sewcialites Sew Along sponsored by the Fatquarter Shop. This was week 5, and the block was pretty difficult. I am making two different block sizes (in two different fabric collections) for this sew-along. The blocks above are my "extras". I had tons of leftover Christmas Morning fabric (Lella Boutique) from a previous sew-along and thought it would be a good idea to try to use it up if I could. So I am making the six-inch blocks with it for the Sewcialites sew-along. And they are quickly becoming my favorites, over my main blocks!

This is the actual fifth block in the sew-along, designed by Carrie Nelson. This is the nine-inch size in Flower Pot fabrics (Lella Boutique again). This was a challenging block, but if you go slowly, starch your fabric, cut accurately, and trim to size things will turn out pretty great.  I would not, however, want to make this block in a smaller size. 

Kimberly suggested that if you wanted a simpler block with a similar look, that you use a basket block from Sewcialites 1, which I did for my six-inch Christmas Morning block.

Here are all my nine-inch blocks. I am really enjoying this sew-along. On Fridays, Kimberly does a live tutorial where she makes the week's block on YouTube's Behind the Seams channel. I put Kimberly on in the background on my laptop and stitch along with her. 

And this is a fun new notion I got recently. It is called a Slap and Wrap Peel, but I call it a "slapper". Eva has had bracelets that curl up like this when you slap them, and a ruler too. In this case, it is used as a holder for the triangle papers Fatquartershop sells. You could use it to hold any bundle of papers in a roll. It comes as a straight flat strip. When you slap it against something it curls up and holds it tight. 

Hope you all had a great weekend. We put our Christmas trees up but didn't decorate them yet. We are hosting Thanksgiving for Sara and her husband Jeff, and Eva, and I don't want to rush the day too much. There will only be the five of us and we are looking forward to a feast. Jeff is a former restaurant owner and Culinary Academy graduate and his specialty is grilling. You know our turkey will be something special. 

On Black Friday however, we will be hitting the road full tilt boogie and getting those Christmas decorations up! This is a first, I am nearly finished with my holiday gift shopping!

Have a great start to your week!

 

Halloween and Block Re-Do

We had a wonderful neighborhood Halloween gathering at my son in law's house near us. The adults sat around a small campfire in the front yard and greeted the kids and their parents as they came by for trick or treating. Eva's dad lives in a neighborhood that goes all out for Halloween, to the extent where people drive from nearby towns to trick or treat. When we first moved here, we lived in his neighborhood and the first Halloween we had 283 kids came by.  I kept track. All the houses were decorated to the nth degree and many people, like our group, sat out in front of their houses to pass out candy. It was all very festive and fun.

Eva was dressed as a mermaid skeleton and in the picture above she is standing with her bestie, who is a spooky black cat. Those girls are growing up so darn fast. 

I remade the second Sewcialites 2 block.  I just didn't care for the way the large print was working in the design. 

Here is a comparison. I think I prefer the one on the right.

We had a big rainstorm today, with lot of thunder and lightening. I am glad it held off until today and didn't spoil the Halloween festivities. I curled up on my chaise lounge with a good book and had a perfectly cozy day. Hope your week got off to a great start.

 

Sewcialites 2, Block 2

Typepad, my posting platform, has been experiencing technical issues for the past four days or so. Sorry for the interruption to my blog posts. I am holding my breath that this posts properly!

I was so excited for Friday to arrive last week because that is the day the new free Sewcialites patterns are released and Kimberly does her YouTube tutorial on construction. I have really enjoyed sewing along with her as she gives so many great construction tips. Only this last week she made some adjustments to the block construction that veered from the written pattern and I had a heck of a time keeping up with her. Basically she enlarged her pieces when cutting in order to trim down the block to size in the end. I got so lost it was ridiculous. I am better off just going slowly and following the pattern.

I am making my blocks in two sizes with two different fabric collections. The upper two blocks are in the nine inch size, using Lella Boutique's Flower Pot fabric. The lower two blocks are in the six inch size using Lella Boutique's Christmas Morning fabric. 

This week's free pattern is called Tussy Mussy. I am not entirely happy with how my nine inch block turned out and may re-do it. The large print with the two large white blobby flowers doesn't look right to me.

Hope your Halloween went well. We had an absolute blast. I will post a picture of Eva in her costume tomorrow.

 

Sewcialites 2 Has Begun

The Sewcialites 2 sew-along has begun. This sew-along is sponsored by the Fatquarter Shop, and there will be block tutorials on YouTube each week. If you aren't doing it, you should consider it. The weekly patterns are free on the FQS website each Friday. I planned to do the 9-inch block in Lella Boutique's Flower Pot fabric for my quilt. However, I have decided to make a 6-inch block as well.

I had scads of leftover fabric from a Christmas sew-along called Christmas Among the Stars. I tell you, when you do a block of the month sew-along with Fatquartershop, you get way more fabric than you need. They are so generous with their kit fabric allowances. I hated for it to go to waste, so I decided to make as many 6-inch blocks as I can with the Sewcialites 2 project and see what I end up with. Maybe a table runner, maybe a small Christmas quilt. We will see where this goes.

This fabric collection is also by Lella Boutique and is called Christmas Morning. It features red, sage green, grey and cream fabrics. The nice thing was, my fabric was already prepped and starched, so I didn't have to do a thing except cut out my pieces. 

I was having fun experimenting so I decided to give the 3-inch block a try. Ugh. That size is just way too small to be fun. Not for me at all. Eva said it was "adorable", but I do not have it in me to make any more. For those of you who make teeny tiny blocks, I admire your fortitude. 

My husband has entered into the Halloween spirit. He went to the grocery store yesterday where they had a special on pumpkins 3 for $12. I think they look pretty festive on the front porch next to the rocking chair I like to sit in. He also planted daffodils in two planter boxes! This is something I always mean to do each October and always forget to do. So we will have daffodils this spring if the pesky squirrels don't dig the bulbs up. 

Family Reunion Catch Up

I picked up this project again, which had been gathering dust on my smaller design wall. It is a Moda Bake Shop sew-along called Family Reunion. The pattern of the same name is in the Moda Bake Shop Rollin' Along quilt book. The Family Reunion pattern was designed by Christine Wald. 

There are some really helpful posts on how to construct the quilt blocks on the Moda Fabrics blog. 

I got the center section put together and have started on the next round of smaller blocks.

 It is a relaxing project that doesn't make me think too hard. I am giving myself some grace to just be quiet this week.

Here we are at Wednesday already. Where does the time go? Eva has a basketball game tomorrow, which I am looking forward to. Who knew Nana would become such a sports fan? Eva will spend some time with us this weekend, as her mom is on a business trip to New York. We made Halloween cut-out cookies yesterday, which taste a lot better than they look! Hope your week is going well. 

Sewcialites 2 Quilt Along

This is my latest fabric acquisition, Buttercup and Slate by Corey Yoder of Coriander Quilts. It was hard to justify the purchase when I have a closet bulging with fabric, but I did it anyway. My bedroom has green walls and a quilt with green in it looks ever so nice there. I've purchased a couple other of Corey's collections and have some leftover fabric that I can add into the mix of this new group.

I am not going to admit which is the chicken and which is the egg, but Fat Quarter Shop just announced that they are going to do a second Sewcialites sew along, starting this month. This is the setting they are proposing, and I thought the Buttercup and Slate fabric would work well for this sampler project. I plan to make my quilt bed-sized with the addition of a coordinating floral border. The larger stars will be green grey, apricot, and yellow tone on tone prints from the line. It will be so pretty in my bedroom next summer.

Not much going on here. Eva had a home basketball game yesterday and I was amazed at how exciting it was and how much fun I had. My fanny is sore from scooching around on the hard bench, and my throat a bit scratchy from cheering, but woo hoo, was it ever a thrill. Her team, the Mark Twain Badgers, won by one point against the Copperopolis Cougars! Now I can't wait to support her at the next game. There are a couple of girls on her team who are on the short side, but man are they fast and coordinated. It was thrilling to watch them dribble up and down the court and shoot baskets. When they do amazing things, good athletes have such a cool "oh, right, it's nothing" attitude don't they? So not like me.  lol  When I played basketball at that age, I stood like an unmoving lump on the court and was anything but cool. Seriously I was a hazard the other girls had to run around.

We made banana muffins today in the hour and a half between when she got out of school and had to return for practice.  She got her mid-term grades and got all A+s except for a B in Math. I guess we did something right in the homeschooling effort over the past two years.

Some Sewing Is Happening

I'm not getting a lot done, but I find if I get up to the sewing room super early, like between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM, I can get a thing or two accomplished. The block above is for Moda Blockheads 4, and is from a previous sew-along I did with Piecing the Past. I just liked the block and decided to use it again.

I have finished enough blocks to say I have enough, but I think I will wait a couple weeks to see what other blocks they might release. I have my eye on at least one block I want to replace and it will be nice to have options. I have loads of fabric left.

Here are my blocks. Can you guess which one I am leaning toward re-doing? Hint: it's a matter of color placement, not construction issues. 

Look who started sixth grade today....Sob.

 

Showing Moda Blockheads 4 Some Love

Now that the red white and blue blocks are off the design wall, I have room to put another sew-along's blocks up so I can look at them. And wouldn't you know, once they were all up there, I saw four or five that I just didn't like. It just goes to show that it is a good idea to display your blocks on a design wall as you progress. It is important to see how the blocks "play together". There always are a few misfits. But if you can see them all together, you make better decisions on what colors to put together in your next blocks. 

So I made one new block for this week, and re-made four more!  All the block patterns can be found on the Moda website in the Blockheads archives. 

This is the new block for this week.

This was a block pattern for another sew-along I did a year or so ago. I love those fabrics together!

I remade the yellow/navy print units on this block.

My other Crown of Thorns block looked nothing like a crown of thorns, so I remade it with different color placement.

And here's the last one I remade.

I will continue to play around with colors and placement as I made a few more blocks to finish up the quilt top. I think I need a couple more "pops" of the navy to make things balanced. I think that darker color draws the eye and I want it to be distributed carefully throughout the quilt top.

You may be wondering, how I managed to get any sewing time in, since I have been singing loudly about how busy I am. Well, here's what happened yesterday. I had Eva for the day, and she wanted to invite her bestie over for a play date. They occupied themselves brilliantly all day, doing a complicated project that involved cardboard boxes, fabric scraps, and a glue gun. Honestly, they took over the kitchen counter and collaborated on this activity all day long. 

Since they were working adjacent to my little desk/work area, I really couldn't concentrate on doing my writing job. So I went upstairs and sewed!  Win win. 

Putting Midnight Moon Away For Awhile

Midnight Moon is a sew-along I have joined where we make blocks in Halloween fabrics from Carrie Nelson's great book "Summer Moon". In the book, the instructions call for making each of the 28 or 30 blocks in THREE different sizes. The blocks are then framed with half square triangles for the very unique setting. I thought that was too much work, so I opted to make my blocks only in the 6 1/2" size. It's been fun and I have enjoyed making the blocks and think this will be a terrific Halloween quilt.

I planned to set the blocks on the diagonal with an alternate plain block (or maybe blocks that would form a chain-I hadn't decided). 

What I hadn't factored in is how small the finished quilt would be when made up in 6-inch finished blocks. Seriously? If I had 30 blocks and set them in a 5 x 6 setting with an alternate block, my unbordered quilt would measure 42 1/2" by 51". Now I'm wishing I had gone for the larger size block.

So, here's what I think I will do. To get a decent size quilt, closer to the size of the top of a queen-sized bed, I'm going to need at least 49 pieced quilt blocks. A quilt top without borders made in a 7 x7 diagonal setting would end up being 59 1/2" by 59 1/2". By the time I added a couple of borders it would be the size I have in mind to use as a lap quilt or to fold at the foot of my bed.

Ok, wake up now if you fell asleep during the math. I need 19 more quilt blocks to make the quilt I have in mind. I have a fat quarter bundle I haven't even touched of the fabrics I've been using, so I am good there. I also have scads of the background and some likely contenders for the border.  Over the next few months, I am going to make the additional blocks for the quilt. There are plenty of patterns for 6 1/2" quilt blocks, so that won't be a problem either. 

I won't worry about finishing the quilt for this Halloween. It will be an ongoing project. It is going to rest for now in its project box, but I promise I will keep working on it. Time to focus on a couple of other tops I started this summer and get them wrapped up.

Two Midnight Moon Blocks Done

Sadly, I did not accomplish as much yesterday as I had hoped. I wanted to make four blocks and finish up the Midnight Moon blocks and set them aside for a while. Life got in the way and I only finished two. Actually, work got in the way. I am trying to work ahead a bit so that when I am visiting my son in September I won't have any work deadlines distracting me. If I look at my September article deadlines I should be able to work one or two of them into every week in July and August and therefore not have any due in September.  Always thinking....

The two blocks in the photo above are Friendship Star on the left and Rocky Mountain on the right. Both were pretty cinchy, especially with Fat Quarter Shop's piecing papers for the square in a square block units (Friendship Star).

Super hot here, with temperatures in the low 100s. We will get through it. We always do. Some folks in our area lost power for most of the day, but we lucked out and kept ours on all day without interruption.

Hope your week got off to a good start!