I need variety!

 I've got a friend with a big surgery coming up in a couple of months, so I want to give them a quilt.  When considering my (considerable) UFOs, my plaid string quilt seemed like a good option for them, based on Julie's beautiful creation.

It's up on the design wall and I've completed a few more 9-patches and sashings, but man! Now I remember why I fizzled out with this quilt.  I'm excited about how it is going to look, but it is so boring for me to create.  Part of why I love scrap quilts is that there are so many different fabrics playing together.  With this one, it's just plaid.  I'm gonna do it, but I need something to spice up my sewing stints as well.

Today I finished my January Bee Blocks:

Finished sewing together all of the 2022 Stashbuster blocks that I had precut:

I'm going for a non-traditional holiday quilt look

And worked on this scrappy bear paw variation that I started over winter break:

I also did some purging, identifying some orphan blocks, some fabric and some thread that I plan to take to Swansons to swap out for some quilting scraps, and along the way I unearthed some of the quilts I started hand quilting but never finished.  I need to commit to getting back to them.  There's the one I made for my bed around 15 years ago but never finished:

And this scrap quilt where I was playing with big stitch quilting in a rainbow of colors - I completely forgot this quilt even existed:

There's this mini twister quilt made from salvaged pillowcases:

Completely forgot about this sailboat baby quilt:

And this self-portrait:

There were others, too.  I amaze myself sometimes with how much I DON'T finish!  Time to change that!

Hitting the reset button

This winter, life has been crazy hectic!  I've been squeezing some sewing time in while running full speed at work and parenting my teenage boys (who are relentlessly creative about finding ways to get into trouble). But then, a week ago, it all came grinding to a halt.  My heart goes out to all whose health and/or livelihood is affected by this current crisis.  Luckily (knock on wood), my family is healthy and we are on vacation from school anyway, so our lives haven't been that disrupted.  My kids may be bored, but honestly, apart from this being a scary pandemic, this time at home has been a dream come true for me!

I read the entire book club book BEFORE the book club meeting for next month!  That right there is a sign that these are crazy times!  While I read A LOT (I've read or listened to 17 books since January 1), I somehow never seem to find time to read the book club selection!

I've also been sewing up a storm while listening to audiobook after audiobook.

I've pulled out my Grandmother's Flower Garden UFO and have done some hand sewing.

I've pulled out my Carpenter's Wheel UFO and made two more blocks.

Can you see that a couple of my muslin pieces are a different, lighter muslin?  Oh well!

I finished my 2018 Temperature Quilt and now just need to figure out borders.

A pretty mild year!  I have LOTS of blue left over (blue was for cold!)

I made a couple more blocks for my String Shadows UFO.

I sewed a baby quilt top, and am currently contemplating...is it done?  Does it need borders?

I pulled out my leftover border blocks from my Sew Many Strips quilt and made two of the corner blocks so I can use this border treatment for another quilt - who knows what I'll put inside?

I've made a total of 11 Jewel Box Stars blocks so far as Leaders & Enders.

There is so much scrappy goodness that I can hardly choose what to work on at any given time.

In the meantime, I'm keeping calm, sleeping in, talking long, slow walks with the dog, and appreciating this time to hit the reset button.

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.

New Life For Old Blocks

Participating in the Quilty Orphan Adoption Event made me dig around in my orphan block drawer.  It's a big drawer, and there are A LOT of blocks in there.  I found a set of twelve 6.5" string blocks.  Alone, they weren't enough to make a quilt, but if I made them into HST blocks, I'd have 24 blocks, which, with a border or two, IS enough to make a small quilt.  That was my mission for today - to turn those sad little string orphans into a quilt.

Piecing went quite quickly, and I added a white inner border,

but then spent a ridiculous amount of time auditioning outer border fabrics.

No one fabric seemed right to me, and then it hit me - a pieced border!  I have all those precut scraps, so I pulled out the 3.5" bin and set about piecing a border.  I love it!  The chevrons remind me of Charlie Brown, so that's what I'm calling this one, the Charlie Brown Quilt.  It measures 34" x 45".

While working on the Charlie Brown Quilt, I pulled out more orphan blocks and set about sewing them together as my Leader & Enders project.  One of my goals this year was to make an orphan block quilt to replace the one I made years ago and used to keep in the car for road trips and sleepovers and visits to the drive-in theater.  Somehow, that quilt disappeared and I miss it, so today I started on its replacement.  What fun to sew orphans and scraps into chunks!  I've made 8 so far, all somewhere between 9.5" and 16.5" square.  This will be one riot of a quilt!

My favorite.  These dresden plate blades are left over from a quilt I made for my sister nearly a decade ago!

I really like this chunk, too!

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

Strippy Scrappy Flippy Happy

Remember the string quilt block I made this weekend, inspired by this blog post/tutorial?  While chipping away at my prolific scraps today, I made four more!

She calls her quilt blocks "Strippy, Scrappy, Flippy, Happy"

My blocks measure 10.5" with a 6" wide center strip and 2" orange "ribs", whereas her blocks are 8.5" with 3" wide center strips and skinnier black "ribs", so the look is a little different but no matter.  I love it!  I have a feeling the finished quilt will be a bit RIOTOUS!  All that color!  All those lines going this way and that!

I remain on task with my sewing and organizational goals for the year.

• I've already started February's Block Lotto blocks, but can't reveal them until February 1 because I got a Sneak Peek at February's pattern.  Again, they are a great way to use up my scraps - I'm not going to the stash drawers for these fabrics but straight to the scrap bins.  
• I've been studiously cutting scraps into precut squares, averaging WAY MORE than my 15 minutes per day minimum of scrap cutting while listening to books on tape - it sure makes the time fly while doing a not-so-exciting task.  I finished the 4th Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny, yesterday, and am now in the midst of Defending Jacob by William Landay.  
• I even remembered to get some new destash fabrics into my ETSY shop, from which I've been getting 1-3 sales per week for a couple months now.  I may just get myself organized and downsized this year, after all!

Back to work tomorrow, which means more knitting than sewing for a few days.  I'm so glad I had this long weekend to really dive back into my sewing room.

Snow Day Sewing

This snowstorm has been such a godsend!  I really needed some time to unwind and sleep in, plus catch up on some chores, work and, of course, SEWING!  One of my goals this year was to bust some UFOs. I'm happy to report that one is DONE!  Remember my scrappy Log Cabin blocks that I couldn't figure out how to set?  I finally just picked a layout and stitched them together, and I love it!

I'm happy to move this from the UFO pile to the Flimsy Waiting to be Quilted pile. 45" x 63"

I'm pretty sure this will be the quilt I give to my new niece, Cecilia.  I drove to New Hampshire with the boys to meet her last weekend, part of the reason I was so exhausted last week (12 hours one way is a long way to drive with no other drivers), but meeting her was worth it.

Meet Cecelia, my newest niece

I held her as much as I could get away with - unfortunately, I had to share with others.

It also mobilized me to finish a quilt for her.  I already have a backing picked out.  My goal tomorrow is to sandwich and start the hand quilting.

While sewing, I also cut hundreds, literally HUNDREDS, of scraps into squares for use in future projects in an attempt to tame my mountains of scraps.  But some of the scraps didn't get cut up.  Instead, I experimented with a string quilt block I found online earlier today.

I know it is bold of me to use orange as the strips around the center of the block, but I had some orange strips already cut, so I thought "What the heck?"  After all, the point is to use up scraps I already have, not make new ones.  I love the finished quilts at the end of the string quilt block post - I'm hoping I'll love my version, too!

I'm glad I made that list of goals at the beginning of the month - it is helping me to focus my efforts when I go down into the sewing room.