Sidetracked by Scraps

After I made the block for Thimbleberries the other night, I started messing around with the scraps leftover from that block; as is typical for me, when I made the flying geese star points, I made small half-square triangles out of the leftovers and then I felt I needed to do something with them.  Well, the goofy thing is that playing around with those leftover scraps sucked up two evenings in the Sweat Shop.  I did finally end up with a small wallhanging quilt top, although it still needs to be quilted and bound.

While I was working on this, I remembered that some quilting acquaintances of mine participated in a different sort of round robin awhile back where instead of adding borders to the center quilt starts, each person who got the quilts was supposed to cut through what already existed and add something to it.  Their quilts turned out pretty interesting, so when I started thinking my star center was looking kind of boring, I decided to add a few slices and splices.  I think the checkerboard border is a little too traditional for the unusual, asymetrical center but it's okay, I think.  At least I was able to use up a few more scraps and experiment a bit--because sometimes it's fun to push the traditional quilting boundaries, isn't it?  And doing it with leftover scraps makes it fairly painless if something doesn't turn out quite right!

If this particular slice and splice idea looks like something you'd like to try, I cut the red strips at 1", so when the block was cut and the red strips were sewn back in, it remained the same size with the same underlying pattern.  Those other quilts I saw from the round robin had a lot of pieced strips added in as well as a curved line or two and some applique.  Try something different this week and see what happens!

I Was Holding Out On You

I'm sure you'll remember Monice and Hen House Designs, and how generous she was go give me two of her Summer Picnic quilt patterns to give away, right?  Well, what I didn't tell you then was that she gave me a Summer Picnic table runner pattern to give away too.  I wanted to prolong the fun, so I held out for a week or two.  She designed this pattern to use wool for the applique, and it looks fantastic in wool as you can see below, but I'm sure if you have an aversion to wool but a knowledge of standard applique techniques, you could convert the pattern to use cotton.

Here's a photo of Monice's runner:

It's a heck of a lot prettier than the bad photo I took of the pattern with too much flash!

If you would like a chance to win the tablerunner pattern, leave me a comment saying you'd love to win and want to be entered.  And if you'd like to visit Monice's Etsy Shop, click HERE.  Unfortunately, I do not have a free copy of her Whimsical Hearts and Tulips pattern to give away, so you just might want to go ahead and purchase it.  It's a beauty, isn't it?

And no, this quilt isn't mine--I just stole the photo from Monice's Etsy shop; hopefully she won't mind!

I'll draw a winner Friday night and announce the winner on my Saturday blog post, so make sure you come back to check!

Not Bad for a Monday

I hadn't talked about it too much, but I've been working for two of our new attorneys since December (the first started in late October; the second began in early December).  Most of the time since then, I've worked long days, putting in about an hour and a half of overtime each day.  That kind of work makes for a pretty decent paycheck but doesn't mean much time for quilting . . . but then this tired quilter didn't feel too much like quilting on some of those long days anyway!  Still, I've been grateful to be a quilter, because whenever I came home from work feeling stressed and a bit like a hampster in a wheel, I'd go into the Sweat Shop; we all know that quilting therapy is better than bathing in Calgon, right?!

Since I've been with the firm for so long, the people who make the staffing decisions like to put me with new attorneys so I can show them what we do and how we do it--the type of law we practice is somewhat specialized, and so many of the attorneys who come to us don't have a background in our field of law.  I know what's available and I can help them as far as information and where to find forms used within the firm, I can advise them on firm policy, and I can show them what to do in different file-handling situations.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, one of our secretaries accepted another position out of state, and so the firm asked if I wanted to work for her attorney and pass my two on to other secretaries. Well, of course I did!  So I started working for him last week; I'm also transitioning one of my "old" attorneys to a new-to-our-firm secretary, which involves a little bit of mentoring but doesn't require nearly as much of my time as working for the attorney did.  (The other "old" attorney is now working with someone who has been with us for several years so I was able to hand him off without any real follow up needed.)

The attorney I'm working with now has been with us for a year and had several years of experience in criminal law before he came to us (we do civil law).  So there are still some things I can help him with in our practice, but the work is a little less stressful, and there's only ONE attorney instead of two.  So tonight, a week into this new assignment, I was able to get off work at a normal time, and it felt a little like being let out of school early!

Once I got home and had dinner with Hubby, I headed into the Sweat Shop for a little more scrap play--this time with my Thimbleberries scraps and the July block for the BOM my Thimbleberries Club has been working on:

This is the first Thimbleberries BOM Lynette Jensen designed.  It's a sampler called Month by Month and the pattern can be found in the Thimbleberries Big Book of Quilt Blocks.  I don't think I want to set the blocks as they originally were set--three across by four down with different colored sashing between the blocks--but I'm not sure how I'll decide to set them.  I'll have to play with them and experiment once the blocks are done.

Since my long work days look like they're a thing of the past, at least for now, I hope to be able to get a few more things done in the evening, or at least get to bed at a decent hour!  Speaking of which, I think I'll head that way now . . . .

Dulcinea

I hope your family had an enjoyable Father's Day.  I escaped to the Sweat Shop a couple times throughout the day but mostly I spent time doing this and that and cooking for my Hubby.  Soccer Son and I made a nice dinner; Soccer Son manned the barbecue and I produced the side dishes.  I actually tried to make Hubby a nice breakfast too, but the dish I made didn't quite turn out right; still, he ate it and said it tasted pretty good to him even if I did overcook it a little bit.  What a sweetie!

Most of the time, Hubby and I don't exchange gifts on holidays and birthdays--nothing big, anyway.  But for Father's Day I gave him a Kindle Fire, just like the one he bought me for Christmas the year before last.  Now when we go on our cruise to Alaska, we'll each have plenty of reading material without having to pack a bunch of books and magazines.

Although my sewing time was limited today, just before it was time to shut everything down for the night, I finished the Dulcinea Schnibbles quilt top:

I like this one!  I'm looking forward to quilting it too--it would be nice to have it done before the 4th of July, wouldn't it?  I have a couple of small piecing projects and then I'll see if I can get it pin basted and quilted.  Now it's time to head to bed--it's back to work in the morning.

Happy Father's Day

To all the dads out there . . . this is my favorite classic ode to dad:



And here are my four scrappy blocks from this week. I checked my binder where I'm keeping the blocks--I thought I was probably getting close to done. Nope, I still have about four weeks' worth to make!

How about you? Did you have a chance to play with scraps?

Can You Come Out To Play?

I realize Sunday is Father's Day and many of us will be busy celebrating with our hubbies (cooking stuff for the BBQ and cleaning up afterward while he dozes in the recliner), so perhaps you won't be able to participate in Scrap Basket Sunday.  Or maybe you'll have a little time while he does something extremely manly that us girls can't (don't want to) do.  If it turns out that you're able to work on a scrappy project after all, please take a photo or two for your blog and add your blog link to Mister Linky.

A friend asked me a couple weeks ago why she had to keep signing up every week, and I told her that Scrap Basket Sunday is more of a drop-in program rather than a life-time commitment.  Participate when you're able and if you don't have something to show one week, there's no penalty--just don't add your name to the link list.  And join in anytime--if you haven't played with us so far, you're always welcome to join whenever you have something.  The idea is that if each of us shows what scrappy project we're involved in, other quilters who might have more scraps than ideas about what to do with them could find that perfect project.  I know I've found a couple "want to make" patterns.  I love the string quilts, so those are high on my list, and I find this block pattern kind of compelling too:

So link when you can if you're just a spordic scrapper, or keep coming back to link every week if you're prolific--all scrappers are welcome!

Ready to Move On . . .

Okay, the blocks for Dulcinea are DONE!  This last batch of six seemed to go a little quicker--maybe I just finally got the hang of it.  Sinta of Pink Pincushion, one of the Schnibbles hostesses, said she didn't trim up the blocks and hers went quickly.  Each block is made up of four sections, and each section has a larger triangle--the large arm of the pinwheel--and two smaller triangles that look like the background of the pinwheel and an inner section that forms a box in the background--or part of a smaller pinwheel depending on how you look at it.  I think you can see it in my blocks below:

The part that makes the large pinwheel is bigger than the part made up of the two smaller triangles, so I was trying to figure out how Sinta sewed her pieces together without trimming.  What I finally decided was that you could line up the outer corner and right angled edges of both pieces and sew along the diagonal seam line using the smaller (two triangle) section as basis for where to sew the seam.  Your seam allowance would be much larger on the large pinwheel arm side, but that could be quickly trimmed just before pressing open.  So, I don't know if that's what Sinta did, but it's a possibility.  The blocks would turn out a bit larger, but if you change the border to one that's not pieced, it wouldn't matter.  And if your blocks turned out a little wonky and didn't match up quite precisely, you could add some sashing to separate them.

I wish I'd thought of this in time to take a photo or two to show you what I'm talking about because if you're like me, you probably don't have any idea what I'm talking about unless you have a visual reference.  Oh, well.  If you're making this quilt and want a speedy finish, cut the large triangles and then cut and sew the two smaller triangles.  Then read my suggestion again--maybe it will make sense.  Because I'd sure be happy if I could save someone a little time!

Next I'll sew my blocks together and add the outer sashing, then the pieced border.  Easy peasy, right?  Well, that's what I thought about the blocks before I started!  But I like the way this looks so far, so it's worth the trouble to make it--and really, it's simple enough.  And, of course, I didn't get interested in quilting in the first place because it was FAST!

A Little Something Else

Another evening of Dulcinea blocks and only four more added to the design wall to show for my efforts.  For some reason, I was a little distracted, which meant I was working a bit sporadically between recesses on the internet--and internet browsing wasn't even for the purpose of looking at anything creative!  No, it had more to do with friends and work and various contacts I wanted to check on.  Do you ever have evenings like that where you just can't settle to the task at hand?  Normally sewing is my relaxation and escape, but for some reason, tonight it just gave my mind a chance to skip from one thing to another.  I hope I have a better result when I lay my head on my pillow tonight, or it's going to be a long night of insomnia--and that's something that rarely happens to me.

I DO have a little something I hadn't shown you yet, though.  Remember that crazy hot day last Saturday when I tortured my poor friends with a non-airconditioned lunch and shopping excursion?  Well during our limited stitchery time that day, I started on the June sheep blanket.  Giving myself the task of making up kits for my friends each month means I feel I have to complete the monthly blanket myself, so I can show them where I used the different colors of wool in the kits--that's kept me current on at least one of my projects!

I think the colors in the blanket are a little deeper than in the photo.  For some reason, these never seem to photograph all that well--maybe it's all that white in the sheep or something.  But I think June's blanket is awfully cute, don't you?

Oh, and no, I didn't get it finished during our limited time together on Saturday.  I worked on it later on Saturday night and again on Sunday before I started playing with scraps; I think I finished it then.  But tonight was our monthly Thimbleberries Club meeting, and most of my friends attended, so I brought the sheep and blanket for show and tell so they could see how it turned out and know what theirs will look like once they finish.

It's back to Dulcinea for me tomorrow night--maybe I'll be able to finish the blocks then.

Slow, Too!

If you're like me and you're participating in making the monthly "vintage" Schnibbles quilts, you might not want to wait until the last day of the month this time.  Or maybe you're faster than I am.  But tonight it took me two or three hours just to make six of the Dulcinea blocks--after I already had the fabric cut!

They look pretty good so far, I think.

But I still have ten more to make--that's at least another three to four hours, and that doesn't even include the time to make the pieced border.  I really didn't think it would take this long, but there's a lot of trimming up to do on these pinwheel blocks, and that's the part that is taking me some time.

I'll admit I probably could have gotten two more done tonight if I wasn't sidetracked before I even got started.  Have you seen this tablerunner pattern?

I'm such a sucker for red, white, and blue, aren't I?  The pattern is in the August 2013 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting.

While Hubby and I were having dinner (and he was watching a World Cup qualifying soccer match), I realized I had a couple quilt magazines I hadn't paged through yet, so right after we were done, I did a quick look-see.  Well, maybe not all THAT quick, but I tried not to linger too long.  Now I'm thinking about making that runner--I know I have some scrappy strips of red and white that have been in my stash forever!  I'll see if I can find some time to play with them--I don't think it will take too long.  But then what do I know?  I didn't think Dulcinea would take too long either!

JEANIE from San Jose left a comment on my Autumn House post, and I wanted to email her back, but she's "no reply."  Jeanie, if you read this, please click on my profile and email me directly so I can respond to your question about block 7.

"See" you all tomorrow, and happy quilting!

Just Lazy, I Guess

When I went into the Sweat Shop tonight I considered beginning the quilting on the County Cottages quilt, but that would have meant unplugging the Bernina, carrying it to a place on the floor where I won't stub a toe on it, picking up the Juki and power lifting it up onto the table, and hooking up the foot pedal and electricity.  Lord, I'm tired just thinking about it, aren't you?!  And I'd probably end up throwing my back out in the process!

So I thought I'd just cut fabric for the Schnibbles Dulcinea quilt instead.

Remember that bag of Minick & Simpson scraps I found in the scrap bin?  I ended up having to add a fair amount to what I had, but I knew I had a several--more than several really--fat quarters in my stash I could use, and I still have a lot of scraps leftover for the border--I didn't get that part cut yet.  But I DO have the pieces cut for the 16 blocks.  And I didn't even strain myself doing it.

I'll probably get a few of these blocks put together tomorrow night to show you.  Unless my vitamins kick in and I decide to do a weight sewing machine lifting work out.

Nah!  I don't think so.