String Shadows

Even though today was a day off work, it was a day full of "adult-ing".  Some of it was frustrating (meeting with my son and guidance counselor at school about him not working to potential).  Some of it was tedious (bill paying, bookkeeping, completing a micro loan application).  Some of it was easy but time consuming (post office, buying county decals for our cars, shopping for supplies).  Some of it was downright scary (learning that a good friend has cancer).  When I finally made it home at the end of the day, all I wanted to do was sew.  I queued up an audiobook and dumped out a new bag of scraps from a guild friend and set out to make my own version of that string shadow quilt I found last week.

The blocks aren't sewn together into rows yet and are just sitting on some background fabric, but what fun I am having!  I need to focus on actually QUILTING some quilts, but I'll be darned if I don't just want to piece tops these days.  My goal is a 6 x 8 quilt plus borders, I think.  We'll see.

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

Lazy Week at the Beach & Getting Inspired Online

I'm had a GREAT TIME in Cancun with my husband!  We walked miles and miles every day.  We swam in the wonderfully warm and clear water.  We lounged - in hammocks, in beach chairs, on our balcony looking out over the water.  We read and read and read (I finished 4 books).  We ate delicious tacos at the 24 hour taco stand down the street.  We visited Chichen Itza, which, for me, an archaeological anthropology major with a concentration in Mesoamerica in college, was a dream come true.

We did a lot of beach sitting

We visited Chichen Itza on the Equinox - a big day for a culture that reveres the sun.

The view from our hotel room

We stopped to eat at a restaurant/artisan center/hotel on our way to Chichen Itza.  This is one of the hotel rooms - no beach, but I would LOVE to stay in something like this!

And I took the time to do something I don't do nearly as much of as I'd like to do - cruise quilt blogs!  It feels so good to not have something else I SHOULD be doing so I can enjoy doing what I WANT to do!  And look what I found!  A Scrap Quilt Challenge!  I love scrap quilts and I love challenges, so I'm IN!  Is anyone else doing this one?

One thing I looked for online was shadow quilts.  Remember that I made one but it just didn't excite me?

I just can't get excited about this quilt.

I want to make another, and these excite me much more:

Wouldn't this look cool with some orphan blocks? Photo credit 

Those double shadows and geese make it so much more interesting! Photo credit

Love that the shadow extends to the border and the diagonal edges on the shadows! Photo credit

Now that I am home, I just want to go down into my sewing room and SEW!

Bored silly with my shadow quilt

I know that I really wanted to make a shadow quilt, but man! Working with just 3 fabrics is WAY out of my scrappy comfort zone.  Despite the fact that this quilt is small - just 33.75" x 48.5" - it took me much longer to finish it than it should because it just bored me.  Don't get me wrong, I like it, I just didn't like making it.

I put the seed packet panels in alphabetical order, or so I thought.  One is out of order, and I took it out and put it in wrong AGAIN!  Oh well, that's where it is meant to stay, I guess.

I imagine I'm not going to much enjoy quilting it either, so this will get done on the machine rather than by hand so I can get it done and move on to something else.

To keep me going while I finished this quilt off today, I started a new scrappy project.  When I peruse quilt images online during my lunch break at work, I keep finding myself drawn to this quilt:

Image credit

I've never made a strippy quilt before, so I thought, why not?  I pulled out 5" squares and made 4-patches, then cut some white 5" squares in half diagonally to make the setting squares.

You know the method of making 4-patches by sewing down two opposite sides of 2 RST squares, cutting in the middle, rotating RST, and sewing down two opposite sides again?  LOVE IT!  Especially the fact that it gives you TWO 4-patches!

This is much more my speed!  I hope to make significant progress on this quilt top this weekend.

Shadow Play

A couple of weeks ago, I followed along with the Shadow Block Mini Quilt Along, and I've been itching to give a shadow quilt a try.  I have a number of panel sets that I thought would make good focus blocks for a shadow quilt, so I pulled one out

and started cutting and sewing.

I didn't have much time to sew today, but I got enough blocks sewn together to get a sense of how it will look.  I'm accustomed to using white or cream backgrounds, so this golden houndstooth (?) was a stretch for me, but so far, I'm liking it.

I think I have 19 of these panels, and the blocks I am making finish at 5" x 6.5" so it won't be a very big quilt,  just a wallhanging.  Hopefully I can finish piecing it tomorrow.  This seems like a good candidate for me to try free motion quilting.  If this works out, this might be a good gift for my mother, who is quite the gardener.  We'll see.

I'm linking up with Monday Making (even though this is Sunday) since I'm sure it's what I'll be working on tomorrow, too.