Sunny Day Sewing

I love my sewing room, particularly when the sun is streaming in the windows, warming up the space and dancing with all the colors.  Monday was such a day, so I spent hour after hour down there, working on several different projects.  (As a shopkeeper, my "weekend" is Sunday and Monday.  Sunday is more of a family day, but Monday is all about ME since the kids are at school and I am off.)

First off, I pulled some neutral strips and starting sewing together some 4-patches.  I bet a good number of you can guess why.

Yep, I'm jumping on the Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt bandwagon!  I've made several of her quilts and have all of her books, but I've never done a Bonnie Hunter mystery.  When describing En Provence, she mentions being inspired by lavender fields.  That was enough for me - lavender and lilac are my two favorite flowers and anything inspired by either appeals to me!  I'm a week behind, but I'm sure I'll catch up.

I made a couple more PLUS blocks.  These are fun to make as I work my way through my scrap bins.  The idea is that once I pull a fabric out of the scrap bin, I use it up completely, either by putting it into a quilt block or cutting it down to one of my precut scrap sizes or both.

And I thought I had made all of the strippy four-patches that I needed for this quilt, but it turns out I'm missing one.  Only one set of 10 blocks has been sewn together so far.  I'm hoping that making the strip sets to go in between the 4-patch strips will use LOTS of scrap strips!

When I wasn't sewing, I was knitting.  The color in this cowl makes me happy, the way it pops out against the black.  The yarn is Bamboo Bloom Handprints, and the pattern is Interrupted Cowl.

All in all, one of the most productive weekends I've had in quite some time.  It feels GOOD!  I'm linking up to Oh Scrap and Monday Making.

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.