Sister's Choice Quilts

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!

 

 

 

 

 

How Nice It Is To Sew

What a nice week this has been to get caught up on my several sewing projects. The two blocks in the photo above are for the Midnight Moon sew-along.  Nothing like a Halloween quilt to pick up one's spirits. Isn't that apple green color divine? It is the perfect accent to a quilt with black and orange. I still have no idea how I am going to set these blocks or how large the quilt will be.  I will be happy with lap size. I am making only the 6" blocks.

These two blocks are for the Moda Blockheads 4 sew-along. I love these muted spring colors and think a quilt featuring them will be just about perfect come April. The fabrics are from three different collections designed by Linzee Cull McCray for Moda. Who would have thought grey and yellow and aqua would be such a great combination?

Eva and I spent the day together yesterday. We made banana chocolate fudgecicles and went to the pool. The pool was super crowded with loud boisterous teenagers, so she didn't feel like staying too long. Also, her mermaid fins have become too small for her growing feet, which really bummed her out. She sure loved pulling on that mermaid get-up when she went to the pool. She has loved that thing for three years, so we got our money's use out of it. I wonder if I can find one in a larger size? She just isn't done pretending she is a mermaid. Childhood just doesn't last long enough, I tell you.

Putting a Quilt Top Together

This week I am focusing on putting a quilt top together. This quilt is "Peace and Healing" by Piecing the Past Quilts. The sew-along started this spring and each week I received the patterns for three or four blocks. The patterns were free at the time, but you can purchase all of them now for $19.99 from their website. I didn't care for three or four of the blocks and swapped out different ones.

Now it is time to sew the top together and I am making some changes to the layout.

The biggest change I am making is that the blocks are supposed to be "framed" before attaching the lattice. I suppose the reason for this is that the designer wants to be sure all the blocks can be squared up to the same size. My blocks all came out 9 1/2", so I don't need any squaring up, thus I am skipping the frames. I'm not bragging, I am just careful. It is amazing how accurate one's blocks can be when you starch your fabric first, pay attention to careful cutting, sew a consistent 1/4" seam, and trim up your units to the correct size as you sew. 

The lattice is pretty cute I think. It has little red and white four patches for the lattice posts. I am going to use the red (from the four patches) for a very narrow inner border, then add a wider border of the cream (same as the lattice). I think that will set off the blocks nicely.

I used all fabric from my stash, a mix of Primitive Gatherings, Pam Buda, and Julie Hendrickson. I did have to buy the lattice fabric, and got a ton of it, so maybe I can use it for the back as well.

Hope your week is going well!

 

Midnight Moon Catch Up

Yesterday I did get caught up in the Midnight Moon sew-along. I knew I had weeks 10 and 11 to do, but discovered I had somehow skipped week 7, All good now, all done. That star block in the middle of the upper row?  I did that three times. I just could not get the colors right. The block on the far right in the upper row is called Darting Birds. I made that one three times too. I kind of hate it. It is a weird block:  easy as sin, but and it was hard to get the colors/contrasts right. I may have to sacrifice that one and come up with a new block.

The Rollin' Along sew along is about to start. I got my Cozy Up fabrics all starched and I am ready to go with the center Great Granny block.

Our weather is warming up, but I am looking forward to it. I love sitting out on my porch reading my book and getting some fresh air. There is a limit though. If it is over 100 degrees, I do not last long! Early morning is the best time to sit out. 

Best of all is the time I have been finding to get some sewing done! 

Ozzie had a birthday yesterday. 15 years old, can you believe it? He definitely has mellowed in his old age. He's still annoying, but not nearly the scamp he used to be.  Here he is, about 13 years ago with a ball of yarn I had been saving for something nice.

Catch Up Day

When you have multiple sew-alongs going on, it is easy to fall behind. And that is what is happening to me at the moment.  Not too badly, but enough so that I plan to spend today catching up on several of the sew-alongs I am participating in.

First up is Midnight Moon, a sew-along based on a book by Carrie Nelson called Summer Moon. I am only making the blocks in the 6-inch size, and have really been enjoying working on them in a Halloween collection by Joanna Figueroa. I have two or three blocks to make to get caught up.

These are my Moda Blockheads 4 blocks. I have just one week to catch up on I think. That's manageable.

This is the Piecing the Past Peace and Healing sew-along. I have three more blocks to make, and I need to start making the block frames and setting squares. This isn't going to happen in a day or two, but I hope to at least finish the blocks.

I have to admit, the Flea Market sew-along has been put on my back burner. I have maybe 5 basket blocks to catch up on. I am to blame of course, but I have to say if there had been any publicity by the sew-along sponsors I would have felt enough encouragement to get back to work on this project. I don't think I have ever participated in a sew-along that started out with such a great impetus, then died out so completely. I still believe in the project and think the quilt will be amazing, so I am determined to keep at it.

Hope you all had a great weekend. It was Father's Day on Sunday in the US. I had Father's Day morning with my dad, which was so nice. My sisters turned up in the afternoon to have a celebratory dinner with him, which I know he was looking forward to. We had a Father's Day BBQ at our house for my husband and my son-in-law, which was lovely.  The early summer weather has been so nice here, wish it would continue. That's not to be apparently, with 100-degree temps expected by Tuesday. How's the weather where you live? I understand It has been all over the map lately!

Rollin' Along Book and Sew Along

I picked up this recently published book, Rollin' Along by Moda Bake Shop that features quilts made from Jelly Rolls. Then I found out Moda Bake Shop is going to do a sew-along for one of the quilts in the book.

The quilt is called Family Reunion and showcases one of my favorite blocks, the Granny Square! 

I have a dilemma though and would love my blogging friends to weigh in and help me make a fabric decision. I was initially planning to use a jelly roll of an adorable collection called Squirrelly Girl by Bunny Hill. 

This collection contains pumpkin, apricot, and a muted brown color. I was thinking of doing the outer border of square in a square blocks with the orange acorn fabric. The question is, is there enough color and contrast in these fabrics?

But then. I studied the photo of the quilt featured in the book, and loved its greens, oranges, and blacks. The greens didn't photograph well in my picture, they look grey, but trust me, the second round of blocks is light green. I remembered that I had quite a lot of Urban Chiks Kitty Corn collection, which has all those colors. The blacks would be striking in the square in a square border.

So, advice, please! Which fabric group should I go with?