September 2022

Covid has left the building around here. I just have a lingering cough. And that, I found out, is due to a sinus infection. Talking around to friends, it seems that there is a secondary infection after Covid. Be careful out there.

The crocheted baby blankets are piling up because I haven't had the energy to go to a meeting. Also, I didn't want to expose anyone else.

 

This is a simple fan stitch that works up quickly.

I had two different skeins of Lionbrand Mandala yarn that were similar in colors: Brownie and Warlock. Using a linen stitch (1sc, ch) makes a softer, drapey blanket.  

At my Friday group, I was given some ugly green/gold upholstery fabric. I brought it home and made 10 grocery bags from it. I have a pattern that I drew up that I really like. It's not too big so the bagger can't stuff it too full for our old people shoulders. LOL!

At the same time I was given a length of double-sided prequilted fabric. I cut it in half for 2 Project Linus quilts. I found the perfect binding fabric in my stash! As I was working on it, I realized how musty it smelt. When I washed it, I added a cup of baking soda to the wash and voila! the smell was gone. 

February 2022

 Yikes! So I had the second surgery. To remove more of the margin of the melanoma, doc had to totally remove the healed portion from the last surgery. To say that it hurts like h**l is an understatement. I'm taking it easy for a week or two until the bandages come off and then it's "watch out world"!

I was able to make a tshirt quilt from some hot rod shirts. These shirts are from a collection of one of the members of the Road Knights car club. I used 20 shirts, stabilized with Pellon911FF. Because I was fitting it to a 60" wide backing fleece. the quilt has no sashing or borders. I quilted it with an allover freemotion jagged zigzag. It turned out pretty nice, if I can pat myself on the back. I gave it to one of the organizers of the car club's annual event for a door prize and she was blown away.

January 2022

Whelp. The month of January has been spent in recovery. I had a largish spot of melanoma excised and I have been rehabilitating the 3" scar to suppleness. The spot itself was the size of a quarter but they have to excise about another 1/2" of skin around it in an elliptical shape. I look like I scraped my shoulder on a piece of sheet metal. :( I was told by the dermatologist that I need to go back in because they didn't take enough away on the margins. Sigh.

I have one quilt finish for the month; it's called The Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt and can be found at From Bolt to Beauty. It's a wonderful way to use up 2.5" strips or jelly rolls. I used one jelly roll and some 2.5 WOF strips that were compatible.

November 2021

 

Look what my Hunny made for me! I’ve always wanted a quilt ladder and once I put it on my Christmas Wish List he just made one! He’s a keeper. 

 

I’ve been doing a lot of sewing and quilting that’s resulted in a stack of completed donation quilts. The pattern is Strippie Quilt from Maryquilts.com. She has a lot of free and easy quilt patterns that I find appropriate for donations. For the backs on these quilts I used fleece because it makes them so nice and cuddly. 

Do you remember last January I made 3 chenille teddy bears? You can read about them here. Anyway, I donated them to the U.S. Marines Toys for Tots. I went to the recruiting center in my town and handed them over. I think I was the first one to donate there this year.

So It's The End of February

For all it's a short month, it will be an expensive one. Last summer we found that our AC unit was rusting from the inside. We were told it had about 5 more seasons so we figured we could replace it at our leisure. Well, last week we realized that our 2 stage furnace wasn't kicking into the second stage. Out comes the repairman who gives us a new thermostat thinking that was the problem. It wasn't. He comes out again and says that the repair/replace of the bad board will be $1100. The furnace is 20 years old. The Husband and I decided to replace the furnace and AC. Can we say $9000? Yep. That hurts. I asked if they can throw in an installed whole hose humidifier too. We got the whole thing installed a day before the sub-zero weather hit us. It was excellent timing!

I've been making more donation quilts. I use up pieces and bits of batting for these. When I use a whole batting in a quilt I save the plastic bag. Then when I trim the quilt, I put the trimmed pieces in the bag. When there are enough there I make frankenbatts. For the most part I use an 80/20 batting but I will occasionally use 100% cotton or wool. That is why I save the bag: I can tell at a glance what batting the pieces are from. This batch of quilts has a frankenbatt, two polyester battings (ugh, not a fan) and one has two layers of washed flannel sheets.

For hand work I've been knitting a border onto the blanket made from leftover sock yarn. It's tedious because the black yarn and my eyesight are not a good combo. I have been staying quite warm under this as I knit. It is lightweight because of the sock yarn, but it is also warm because the sock yarn has a lot of wool in it. When the furnace was down, this was the perfect thing to work on.

Donation Quilts

 

 

Since I was confined to the house in September and October due to horrific wildfire smoke and COVID-19, I made some donation quilts.

These are four little quilts for Project Linus.  

One was a simple pieced kit with an appliqued ribbon. I backed it with the included fabric and quilted on my machine.

One was a pre-printed panel that I backed with fleece and quilted on my machine.

Two were identical pre-quilted yardage of tote bags to cut out and sew up. The backing was cute so instead of making totes, I backed them with more fleece and then tied them. I tied one from the front and one from the back. These ended up being 34"x40". Too cute!

April 2018 part deux

I also made some quick quilts this past month. This is one of my favorite patterns. It has been generously shared by mary Johnson at MaryQuilts.com. It is called Strippie Quilt.

Donation quilts

I hasn't all been crocheted and knitted baby blankets. I found 20 prepped applique blocks on a give away table at my small quilt group.

After satin stitching around the appliques, I combined 4 for each quilt. With the addition of a wide top and bottom border and then a green outer border, the quilts were big enough for a child. Each quilt was quilted differently. I started with a grid on one of them and realized that it took too long so the rest were quilted with differing meanders. All were backed with soft cuddle fabric.

Recent QOV finishes

This first quilt was given to me as an in-completed row quilt. I ended up redoing the words but the trees and houses were lovely and well sewn. I dug through my stash for the star row and the background of the flag row. The flags themselves were red, white and blue, which isn't a bad thing but the rest of the quilt was a bit more primitive in coloring, so I over dyed the flags with a tan dye. It works.

I wrote about the next quilt in the previous post.

Pinwheel Quilt

A recent spate of pinwheel quilting has resulted in this child's quilt. I used an older charm pack that I found in the stash and made half square triangles. After putting sashing in between the blocks, it turned into a decent size: approximately 38x38".

Here is a close up of the quilting. I used the seam line of the HST as the spine of the feather for the white side and then just did a curved line in the colored side. Ribbon candy was quilted in the sashing and the border was done with S-curves (or rope). I love how this turned out

Quilting? What is that?

It hasn't been all knitting. I swear it hasn't. It just has been so windy around here that I couldn't take and photos of the latest finishes so the color of these is a bit off at the bottom because I had to shoot indoors.

I have found that I really do not like the super dense quilting. Not only does it take absolutely forever to do, it makes the quilt not-quite cuddly. After all, these are charity quilts and should be snuggly.

This quilt is very densely quilted. But because I chose a thin poly thread and a soft batting it isn't as stiff as it could have been. The working title of this quilt was "Boy, Is It Pink!"

I was brave and went with pink thread.

Squares

The printed squares in this baby quilt were given to me in the form of scraps at a retreat I attended several years ago. I cut them down into 2.5" squares and put them away.

Recently, I dug them out and by combining them with white-on-white 2.5" squares and some 2.5" WOW strips, I came up with this quilt.

The quilting is easy. I used the quilt's rows and did some hearts. It took a bit of practice on paper before I could get the hearts because they needed to be quilted from the right edge of the heart to the left edge before moving on to the next heart. When I draw a heart, I go from left to right, so quilting these like this was backwards from how I draw them.

When it came time for the borders, I felt more hearts would be too many. And so I opted for straight line stitching, which in this case was done free hand. After all, it was only 2.5" that I had to travel at a time and I was too lazy to do ruler work.

Halted progress

I had to stop the quilting progress on this little quilt. This is another donation quilt using up all the pre-cut 2.5" WOW squares from the scrap bin plus all the 2.5" squares I saved from someone's trash bin at a quilting retreat several years ago. I've gotten the center portion quilted with this:

And the two outer borders are ditch stitched, but then I came to a screeching halt. I realized that even though I wanted to do ribbon candy quilting in that inner border, I had never, as in NEVER, done ribbon candy. Time to practice. I have found that lined notebook paper is the perfect thing to prqactice with since I don't have to drawn the line.

What are you working on? It's a Linky Tuesday post!

Leftovers

I had some blocks leftover from Clara's quilt, so I combined them with some sashings and here's what resulted!

I quilted it in a simple large meander.  

It's a good size: 68" x 68".

August 2015 Finishes

The colors look strange in these photos, too saturated, so I reset my camera to factory defaults. I'm not going to reshoot these so you will have to live with it.

These are the Spiral Eyelet socks from the last post. I can't believe it took me all month to make these. According to my Ravelry account, I started these on August 3 and finished on August 24. This is a pattern that you definitely have to pay attention to when knitting.

I found a panel at one of my local quilt stores called "Buttons and Blooms" so I bought two of them. The original panel can be seen at the bottom of the quilt. I cut the other one to make a mirror image, added a coordinating fabric and Boom! a child's quilt resulted.

I was on a role with some preprinted quilty type fabrics. This one is log cabins. I backed it with fleece and then quilted it. Another child's quilt!

Here's the back.

For the last several years, I have made a quilt for an annual September auction held by the local hot rod club with all the proceeds going to breast cancer research. Except for last year because I didn't have anything ready. Way back in the dark ages (1980s I think) I bought a lot, and I mean a huge amount, of Harley Davidson bandannas. Not too strange, considering that there was a Harley parked in the garage. I started making quilts with them resulting in a quilt made with brand-new vintage bandannas. I believe that this is Harley quilt number 8. And yes, there are still more of these bandannas.

Is It Cheating...

to use a 'cheater panel'? Not that this is a panel, but I thought it would be a wonderful piece of fabric to practice the Cathedral Window/Orange Peel type of quilting.

I backed it with fleece and quilted away! This is a wonderful way to build quilting muscle memory.

It is now bound (don't you love polka dots), labeled and in the donate pile.

I also completed two Infinity scarves from some rayon I found hanging out in the fabric stash. One for me and one for somebody else. Rayon makes a nice scarf, don't you think?

Sewing on June 30, 2014

It started with this charm pack that was purchased several years ago on a shop hop. It has been marinating in the stash long enough.

I had a plan to start, but it was a major fail and I ended up trashed some of the fabric squares. It broke my heart, but I re-thought it and came up with this one. Those blocks measure 8" finished. I can see that they need to be shuffled a bit more to break up that concentration of yellow in the upper right and the blue/greens in the lower right.

There is plenty of the WOW fabric and with the addition of sashing (2" maybe?), I think it will make a passable child's quilt.

There are some units left over, see them on the left?, that can be used either on the back or in something else. I can always add them into the parts department.

I'm linking up with Judy L. for Design Wall Monday.

Getting Better All The Time

I finished another donation quilt using that strip quilt from maryquilt.com

I quilted the border in a free motion back and forth. It is very organic looking isn't it?

The center of the quilt was quilted in an all-over floral looking free motion motif.

The outer border is another floral motif.

The binding was machine applied using the flat felled foot for my sewing machine, I believe I have blogged about this method. 

Size: 53x70

Signature thread: gray on the top and a variegated gold in the bobbin

Batting: 80% cotton /20% polyester

I am linking up to JudyL's Design Wall Monday.