This is a first!

These past couple of weeks, I've been sewing up a storm!  Every spare moment, I've been at the machine or the ironing board or cutting table.  For the first time in the three years I've been doing Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilts, I'm completely caught up!  Maybe I'll actually finish one!

Clues 1-7 DONE for Frolic!

Or maybe not - I still haven't finished On Ringo Lake or Good Fortune, but I haven't given up hope yet.

Good Fortune still needs three more borders added - I love the look of pieced borders, but I hate adding them!

On Ringo Lake just needs to be assembled, but I don't love the colors so my motivation is low.

I've been finishing lots of other things lately, though.  I've read half a dozen books in the last couple of weeks, and I finished several knitting projects for gifts this year.

Matching hats for my little boy neighbors who love everything I wear in rainbow colors.

Socks for my mom (at the bottom of her bed is a quilt I made her about 12 years ago - another Bonnie Hunter pattern - and on the bed is a flannel & denim rag quilt I helped her make for herself).

I hope this creative finishing streak continues - I have LOTS of works in progress that I would love to see come to completion!

Plugging away at my Good Fortune

Finishing up my Sew Many Strips top has inspired me to knock out some more UFOs.  First up...Good Fortune!  So far, the center is done and the first of four borders is on.

And as my leaders and enders project, I've decided to give Kevin the Quilter's Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt a try.  Apparently, all it uses is squares in two contrasting colors, so I pulled out my 2.5" squares in those two colors, along with a couple of 5" squares that I plan to quarter.  Is it possible that I'll be able to make the whole quilt with my precut scraps?

A couple twosies done, many, many, many more to go!

Pursuing my Good Fortune

Now that my last quilt is in its new home and in use

The recipient posted this photo of the quilt (I cropped it) on her Instagram

I've turned my focus back to finishing my Good Fortune quilt.  All of these blocks are done, time to finish the alternate blocks. 

I accidentally made too many blocks...

Of course, I should also finish LAST YEAR's On Ringo Lake mystery quilt,

I have made no progress since getting to this point.  C'mon, Erin, you're so close!

but the colors in this year's quilt just make me happier, so they seem to always get top billing.  And I'd love to finish my 2018 Temperature Quilt, but I seem to have lost my paperwork/chart, so that project is stalled out until I find my worksheets or redo them (I still have December and part of November to complete).

This is everything through September assembled.

And then there is this quilt that I need to finish hand quilting before my niece's first birthday in April. 

I've finished quilting all the white spaces - now to the colored stars

With all these things to finish, I sure hope I can be disciplined about not starting anything NEW!

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making.

Good Fortune Progress

I was still plugging away at Clue 7 of the Good Fortune Mystery quilt when the BIG REVEAL happened, so, of course, I abandoned Clue 7 in order to play around with the final layout.  I love the spinning star block

and this secondary block seems warm and exciting to me.

Hello, little blackbird!

We'll see how well they play with each other and the THREE pieced borders in the final analysis.

I know they are a lot of work, but I LOVE pieced borders!

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making.

Catching up

I'm back in Massachusetts after a wonderful couple of days relaxing with my husband and kids.  I knitted, I quilted, and I binge-watched TV shows.  I LOVE VACATION!

After an uneventful drive home, I finished up Clue #5 for my Good Fortune Mystery Quilt.

Clue #5 done and trimmed

I'll start Clue #6 tomorrow before heading up to NH to spend Christmas #2 with my sisters and their families.  In the meantime, I'm quilting like crazy, trying to finish my 8-month-old niece's quilt before her first birthday!

I've really enjoyed hand quilting these last few days.  Why do I set it aside for so long???

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making.

A Wild Ride!

The time between Thanksgiving and New Year's always seems crazy, but never more than this year!  My husband started a new job in New Jersey in mid-October - and yes, I live in Massachusetts.  He comes up to visit most weekends, but this is my third time driving down to New Jersey with the kids since Thanksgiving.  I know that many, many families live apart in order to make things work financially or because of the nature of their jobs, or for any number of other reasons.  I always thought, "wow, that must be a challenge."  I was right!  I miss him terribly when we are apart, and I don't want him (or me) to leave when we are together.  That's normal, I guess.  What perhaps isn't so normal is how much I RESENT the traveling!  All I can think of when I'm stuck in traffic (usually somewhere in Connecticut) is that if I can't have my family all together, I at least want to spend the time apart doing something I love - quilting or knitting - not stuck in a car surrounded by other cars.  Ugh!  (OK, pity party is over)

As a result, I've not been as productive in the sewing room as I normally would strive to be during this time of year.  My main project has been Bonnie Hunter's Good Fortune Mystery Quilt.  I'm behind, but not too behind.  Another clue will be released tomorrow while I am still working on last week's clue - and I still haven't finished assembling last YEAR's quilt, but I'm enjoying the process.

Clue 1 done and trimmed

Clue 2 done but NOT trimmed

Clue 3a done and trimmed

Bonus triangles from Clue 3, NOT trimmed

Clue 4 done and trimmed

I've been keeping my finished pieces in a butter cookie tin (much like the HSTs that I shared last month).

I dutifully ate 5 lbs of butter cookies so I could use the tin in this way.  :)

In the meantime, my 16-year-old son has been sharing memes (is that right?  Are these memes?) with me, letting me know that he isn't the only one who doesn't know what to expect when he finds a tin of  butter cookies:

I'll have two days back at home before I get back to work.  I'm hoping I can get completely caught up with this year's mystery, make some more progress assembling last year's mystery, and plan out some baby quilts.  I have two showers in February and one in April - better get cracking!

Good (and bright) Fortune

After spending a wonderful and relaxing few days in New Jersey with my husband's family for Thanksgiving, I'm back home.  I'm proud of myself for feeding the dog and unpacking my suitcase BEFORE sprinting to my sewing room to start my Good Fortune Mystery Quilt!

First, I needed to pull fabric.  I decided on ORANGE and GREEN because I have so much of them and they are my absolute favorite colors, and then YELLOW and PURPLE because those are the two colors I have the least of and because it should make for a bright and cheerful quilt (I hope!).  And lots of scrappy neutrals make my heart sing.  I took this photo to remind me which color corresponds to which color in Bonnie's directions (please, Please, PLEASE let me remember that my green is actually blue in her directions and that my purple is her green!).

Before cutting any fabric, I went into my precut scraps to see what I could make from those.  I had a bunch of the appropriate sized squares,

and I had a bunch of neutral strips the correct width for which I just had to cut yellow to match.

To my absolute delight, I was able to sew together almost 25% of Clue #1 without even cutting into my neutral yardage, and just cutting a couple strips of yellow!

Of course, the next 75% will take much longer since I'll have to iron and cut fabric...

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making as well as Bonnie's Monday Mystery Link Up.

Lapped

I am a slow runner.  I don't run often, but if I run on a track with other runners, I am almost guaranteed to be lapped, to have the same person pass me more than once on my way around the track.

It is the same with quilting, I am afraid.  The new Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt, Good Fortune, starts is just three days, and here I am just now finishing block construction and just now assembling my quilt from LAST year!

Oh well, I have had so much fun doing this one, On Ringo Lake, that I am determined to do Good Fortune as well.  I am driving to New Jersey tomorrow, and won't be back until Sunday, so I'll get a late start and won't have time to finish On Ringo Lake first, but that's OK.  My goal is to do a fabric pull in the morning before I hit the road so I can jump right into sewing when I get back home.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

NOVEMBER!!

In my world (college advising), October is commonly referred to as Suck-tober.  Crass, I know, but whoa, what a crazy, exhausting month!  Today is the deadline for seniors to apply Early Action or Early Decision to most colleges, so tomorrow, things start to slow down to a trot instead of this full-on gallop we've been experiencing all month.  YAY!

To me, that means picking up the guitar again, reading for pleasure (I have a backlog of new-to-me cozy mysteries waiting for me) and SEWING!!  Tonight, in between panicked emails from the kids who didn't listen to me about getting things done early and are just now finalizing essays before submitting applications tonight, I am whipping up a couple of mini Christmas stockings.  They usually sell well in my ETSY shop, and those that don't sell, I use to give gifts to friends and family.  They are the perfect size to hold a gift card, but I've also filled them with candy, lottery tickets, money, any little thing.

When I got online tonight, I found that Bonnie Hunter has announced this year's mystery quilt!  ACK!  I guess I should get back to finishing LAST year's quilt; I had fun working on it last year, and want to do it again this year.  I have 18 more blocks to put together before I can start assembling the quilt.

I blame Pinterest!

I set big goals for myself two weeks ago when I had a long weekend.  And I did a pretty darned good job of keeping them...

I finished my hat and have been wearing it non-stop.  It is made from Mega Merino, a soft, warm and squishy yarn that I used to sell in my shop.

I removed the offending neck from my sweater, knit on a new neck CORRECTLY, and am about halfway done with one sleeve.  The only problem is, I can't remember where I put the remaining skeins of yarn to finish the sweater.  Doh!

Sweater is based on an old cotton rolled edge sweater that I love to throw on for weekend lounging.

I finished reading Raven Threads, but am only now starting Unraveled.  It's very unlike me, but I didn't read anything for a week and a half.

I'm up to date on my Temperature Quilt, and I'm liking it.  It's going to be an odd quilt, for sure, but it'll be colorful, and sometimes that's all I need to make me happy.

I hate not having a design wall! This is most of the first two columns, but I can't put them together until February is over so I can add in the February average temperatures in the right place.  The yellows are the freakishly warm days we've had.  The darker the blue, the colder it was!

I didn't quite make my goal of 20 On Ringo Lake blocks completed, but I've got 18 and am slowly assembling the rest. 

The problem is this: I opened one of those darned emails from Pinterest with some Pins they think I'd like and they were right.  I saw this pin:

Image Credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/457819118351516579/

and had to start making one right away!  Scrappy...check!  Will use up some of my overflowing pre-cut scraps...check!  Will challenge me...since I am new to Half Rectangle Triangle Blocks, check!  I haven't gotten far, but I am having fun seeing these blocks come together. 

I'm using this as a Leaders & Enders project for my On Ringo Lake quilt...or is it the other way around?  Either way, I'm at my machine every chance I get, which, unfortunately, isn't as much as I'd like.

That's OK, I have a two-week break coming up in March.  I'm going to name my goals for that now - finish piecing On Ringo Lake and baste/start hand quilting my new niece/nephew's quilt before his/her arrival at the beginning of April.

In the meantime, I have a busy weekend ahead of me - running the clock at three different basketball games for three different teams, watching my husband's team compete in the conference quarterfinals (send winning thoughts our way on Saturday afternoon), and driving a vanload of kids to the movies to see Black Panther (we, as a school, rented out a theater and buses to take our students).  I hope I can find some time to sew and knit this weekend, too!

Oh, and I spent an entire day last weekend watching Alias Grace on Netflix.  It was darker and had less resolution and clarity at the end than I typically like, but oh the quilts!  Beautiful!!!

Long Winter Weekend

One perk of boarding school life is the vacations.  Today marks the start of Long Winter Weekend, a four and a half day weekend for us.  The timing is perfect - I'm starting to feel a bit under the weather, and I can use the rest.

But I'm determined to enjoy this time off.  In a perfect world, this time off would include:

• Knitting!  I want to complete this hat that I started earlier this week,

• and make some progress on this simple rolled cuff sweater I started several years ago.  I added the neck one night while watching a movie at the drive-in movies, and was dismayed to learn in the light of the following morning that I had picked up the stitches wrong, creating an unwanted ridge.  My plan this weekend is to take the neck off and put it back on correctly.

• Reading! I have many unread books waiting in the wings, but I've selected Unraveled by Maggie Sefton and Raven Threads by K.D. McCrite as quick and easy reads for the weekend.

• Quilting!  It's time to baste my next hand quilting project.  And my fabric order from Missouri Star Quilt Company arrived today (man, they are FAST!) so I plan to catch up on the blocks for my Temperature Quilt.  

• And more quilting! I'd like to get 20 of the 50 blocks done on my On Ringo Lake quilt; I currently have 5 done, so 15 to go.

In between times, I'll be going to a couple of my son's basketball games and hosting a Super Bowl viewing party.  I'll let you know on Monday how well I did achieving my weekend goals.

Slow and steady progress

While the weekend is usually my time to create, I spent this weekend watching my 7 year old nephew and my two year old niece.  Boy, am I out of practice doing 24/7 duty with little ones!  I'm still exhausted, a day later!  But I sure do love the fact that I am close enough to spend time with family.

I read 4782 books to my niece over the weekend.  Leo, our bearded dragon, likes looking at the pictures.

So, not too much progress on my Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt, On Ringo Lake.  Four blocks down, forty-six to go!

I still have some brown flying geese to make, but I'm making them as I make the blocks to break up the monotony of making so many geese.

I'm keeping up with my Temperature Quilt daily.  It is fun to spend 5 minutes each morning working on it before work.  I look up the high and low temperature for my town from the day before on Weather Underground, record it on my worksheet, pull out the appropriate colors, and then sew the one seam.  Easy peasy!

I've sewn consecutive day blocks together when possible.  See all that yellow?  Warm January!

However, I'm still missing eleven of the thirty fabrics I need for the project, so I have only been able to make 15 of the 28 blocks for the month of January so far.  I went back to my local quilt shop to see if they had gotten more Kona Solids in, but no.  I tried to shop local...but I don't want to wait any longer!  I placed my first ever order with Missouri Star Quilt Company; I love the tutorials so I thought I'd give the shopping experience a try.  Besides, I always hear about those Daily Deals - I want to see what those are all about.

We get a four day weekend this weekend coming up - I foresee lots of sewing in my future!

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making.