If you like scrap quilts, you have to go see the Tucker Quilt Parade over at Pam Buda's Heartspun Quilts. There were a lot of scraps sewn into little quilts in November. Most of the quilts shown were made in the USA, but there were a few from Canada, and also represented were UK, Paris, Brazil, and Holland.
What am I sewing with my scraps this week?
Mostly I am making blocks from the scraps being generated from the Quiltville mystery. We are working on step #4, and this is the first block I put together.
Hey, it's Santa!
Only guess what?
I sewed the blocks together wrong. Ugh. I was so excited about my blocks looking like Santa, that I sewed 4 sets wrong before I realized the problem. Today I will be unsewing those Santa blocks and this time I'll be sewing them according to the directions.
And with the tiny scraps from the mystery blocks, I have been sewing double nine patches for Omigosh. Here are the newest 4 blocks.
To see what other scrap quilters are sewing this week, hop over to the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.
For the month of December the Rainbow Scrap Challenge isn't focused on one colour. We are encouraged to make blocks in any of the colours we may have missed working with throughout the year, and to get our blocks organized and sewn into quilt tops.
I sewed a couple of Maverick star blocks from the red scraps that are all over my sewing room from making blocks for the Quiltville mystery. There were lots of odd ends of strips to use up and they are perfect to make these star points. Can you see how these red points are mostly ends/selvage scraps?
I have 16 blocks for this collection so far. I wasn't sure if I wanted light stars on dark background, or dark stars on light background, so I tried both. I decided I like both, so will continue to add to the collection as scraps appear in 2016.
Speaking of 2016, Angela is designing a scrappy column quiltalong for us - details are here.
To see what the scrappy quilters are sewing today, hop over to SoScrappy.
Four more blocks are finished for my long term project - the Omigosh quilt. This brings the 2015 total of completed double nine patch blocks to 64, which means that 2 years into the project, the blocks are approximately 25% completed.
Hop over to RSC and see what the quilters are up to this month. Angela is cooking up a new scrappy project for us for 2016. I'm not sure if I want to start another project when I should be finishing my other 8 rainbow quilts, many of which are so close to finishing!
It was such a busy week I haven't had time for blogging, and even if I did, my internet connection has not been cooperating with me. But it's randomly back today, so I'll try to post this.
I've been making some little nine patch blocks and using up some lime green scraps. This is the tin that my Omigosh scraps are stored in. The tin is 6.5" x 9" and contains hundreds of small bits of fabric, some squares, some strips, and some partial and completed 9 patch blocks. I love this tin in a very extreme (somewhat concerning) way! LOL!
I've sewn up a pile of little blocks today, and here is the first finished double 9 patch block. Lime green blocks are noticeably absent in the block collection so far, so hopefully there will be more made to join this one today.
Here's a picture that gives a better perspective on the block size. It is smaller than the pattern!
One more done, about 50 more (not all lime green) blocks to go!
Hop over to the Rainbow Scrap Challenge to see what the other quilters are sewing with their lime scraps.
Lots of power sewing is going on this weekend, and in between piecing the quilt blocks I am trying to finish, I am making little Alamo Stars as leader/enders. You can see one brown star being slowly made, and two green and blue star pieces clipped together ready to be the next leader/ender block.
These are the first 6 stars finished using greenish batik scraps, and some leftover brown pieces from last month.
To see more scrap projects in the works, hop over to SoScrappy.
The colour of the month is lime green over at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I happen to have a lot of lime scraps left over from my October UFO, so it was quick and easy to make up a couple Maverick Star blocks.
I fussy cut the centre squares from some of my favourite scraps, and cut the background pieces from 5" charm squares. These two lime blocks will join my slow growing collection of stars.
To see more lime scrap postings, hop over to SoScrappy.
It's brown month for the RSC'ers.
I don't love brown (it's just so dark and colourless!) but we are learning to get along. I must admit that I like brown quite a bit more when I call it chocolate brown!
Here are the brown Alamo star blocks I have sewn so far this month as leader/enders. Their job will be to help the other blocks to sparkle in the finished quilt :)
I've also finished 4 brown blocks for the Omigosh collection.I have more than half of the double nine patch blocks finished now. That means about 1/4 of the piecing is done on this quilt - now that's progress.
Here's the pile of the blocks that live in my fridge, where they can stay nice and fresh for years!
To see what the RSC'ers are up to with their brown scraps, hop over to SoScrappy's link up.
Over at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge we are switching from September's orange to October's brown. I had a few orange pumpkin seeds to finish up. 16 seeds were sewn into 4 blocks to add to the collection. I think it's time to give some serious thought to a layout for these blocks.
My main project for brown month is going to be to machine quilt my brown block sampler from a few years ago. A few blocks each week ought to get it done in a month.
I also finished 2 orange blocks for my scrappy sprouts project (pattern here).
This is the sprout stalk so far, a total of 6 blocks. It has a long way to grow!
To see more RSC projects, hop over to So Scrappy.
Just a wee bit of orange sewing has been going on here this week. A few Alamo stars were made as leader-ender blocks, and a couple of pumpkin seeds were hand stitched. I am using up some small pieces of orange left over from my first scrap squad quilt. To see what the rainbow scrappers are accomplishing, hop over to the Saturday link up. Angela has a draw going on to win a bundle of Vicki's yummy hand dyed fabric. (I won a package of her fabric last year and loved it - you can see the quilt I made here)
The majority of my sewing time this week has been focused on finishing my next scrap squad quilt, which will be posted on Friday on the Quiltmaker blog.
I am struggling with some perfectionistic tendencies about these seam joins. This just does not make me happy. Only 1 of the 4 HST blocks are accurately positioned at this join, in spite of using a thousand pins. Sheesh ....that's a 25% success rate. And that is how it's going overall with the piecing of these blocks. I know I can do better than that, but it's these darn bias triangle edges that are kicking my butt!
Okay... enough complaining, gotta get back to "work"!
It's orange month for the Rainbow Scrap Challengers. Orange is a happy colour, but not a colour I have worked with often. And it's definitely not a colour I buy when I am at a quilt shop.
So it's always a surprise to discover just how many orange scraps I seem to have accumulated when I don't actually buy orange yardage! How does it actually get into my sewing room?!?
It's a mystery!
Here are the orange Alamo Star blocks that were finished this week as leader/ender pieces. I have been adding to my collection for about 3 years now and have over 250 blocks sewn. However, since the blocks only finish at 2.25" I need a bazillion of them to make a quilt. I am not in a rush :)
To see more orange scrap blocks, and to visit our famous leader and teacher extraordinaire, hop over to SoScrappy.
I didn't get myself organized enough to get this blog post done on Saturday, so these blocks are still on the design wall. In August the Rainbow Scrappers were using up their indigo scraps. I hand appliqued 12 pumpkin seed blocks which are sewn into 3 complete blocks, and finished piecing 6 alamo star blocks.
I also found a few odd seed blocks kicking around the sewing room and finished them up into blocks. So this adds 6 more blocks to the collection - 3 indigo, 1 red, 1 lime green, and 1 pink or rose or whatever colour that is.
To see more design wall posts, hop over to Patchwork Times.
There are five Saturdays in the month of August so there is an extra week for the Rainbow Scrappers to work on our dark/indigo blocks. I made a couple of Maverick Star blocks this week. It's another long term project I work on whenever I have some scrap triangles to use up.
The first block is a golden star on dark blue fabrics.
The second block is a dark star on a light background.
Love that millenium fabric in the middle! Can you believe that fabric is 15 years old this year, and I still have some of it hanging around!?!
Here are the dozen maverick star blocks I've made so far. I have a few colour gaps to fill in, especially with dark colour background blocks.
To see what the other RSC'ers are sewing, hop over to SoScrappy.
The rainbow scrap challenge is working with indigo or dark scraps this month. The only block I made this week was another scrappy sprouts block (pattern here). It's quite a simple 9 patch block, with 4 dark squares, 3 light squares, and 2 HST's. But when it's joined to another block, with a stem added in between, it becomes a sprout!
It's a great block to use up small bits from other projects. Did you see the finished sprout quilt over at Poppyprint? That is so inspiring - an amazing scrap quilt made by many loving quilters, and given to someone needing support and encouragement. And just look at this great rainbow version of sprouts here.
When you join a few blocks together, it becomes a bean stalk.
It will look better when there are more sprouts in the collection, but you have to start somewhere - this is my baby sprout!
Hop over to SoScrappy to see what other scrap quilters are sewing this week.
And if you're in the vicinity of Fergus, Ontario, stop by the Scottish Festival and visit me in the heritage tent. The Red Hot Chilli Pipers are here from Scotland and you don't want to miss that!
With such a busy week, I have not had nearly enough time in the sewing room to keep me sane. I hope to remedy that with lots of sewing time this weekend.
I did cut and sew a few little Alamo Star blocks. This is the order of construction of the 17 pieces in this block.
I am finishing up the blocks cut from my red scraps last month, and switching over to the colour of August which is dark blue/indigo.
I have lots of that colour in my scraps and hope I have the time to do it justice this month!
Hop over to SoScrappy and see what the Rainbow Challenge folks are up to.
Today I am hand appliqueing a few red pumpkin seed blocks. It's a hot summer day, so it's perfect for sitting in the shade and enjoying some stitching.
Hop over to SoScrappy to see what other red scraps are being sewn.
It's also a perfect day to enjoy some fresh summer fruits!
These are the newest Alamo star blocks that have been sewn as a real leader-ender project, while I was sewing my tumblers as a fake leader-ender project! It's really hard to resist when a project takes over your sewing brain, which is what happened with my mini tumble.
To see more red scrap projects being sewn this month, hop over to SoScrappy.
Today I am in Michigan learning about the maintenance and restoration of human powered vintage sewing machines. It sounds very "geek like" when I say this out loud to someone who is "normal", but this stuff just "turns my crank"... LOL! That's a funny joke for quilters who love hand crank machines :)
I'm also doing a hand quilting demo with Cheryl, so I'm taking my Mini Tumble to quilt. Cheryl is a 'stabber' and I'm a 'rocker' (hmmm.... now that's a sentence you don't hear every day!) so we'll be a good combination to demo these techniques.
Happy July 4th to my American blog readers! I hope you enjoy fireworks, picnics, parades and lots of family fun as we did here in Canada on July 1st.
And it's a special day for the Rainbow Scrap Quilters. We have a new colour to work with for the month of July - red. I love pure red, not so much the orangey reds, so I dug out the red scraps that I really like, and made a couple of red sprout blocks for my new RSQ project (free block pattern is here).
Hop over to Angela's and see what the other quilters are sewing with their red scraps.
So many fantastic rainbow projects are going on this year. Angela is offering a free rainbow pattern, and there are so many weekly link ups showing projects with fun blocks - cows, birds, rabbits, stars, dresdens, cats... an amazing and creative array of ideas. All of a sudden my RSC projects were boring to me. And because I had come down with a serious case of Startitis, you just know I had to start a new Rainbow Scrap project.
I decided to start a scrappy sprouts quilt.
You can find the free block pattern here.My garden is a total washout this year, so I am going to grow fabric sprouts instead. This is the first block for this project and I have a few ideas of things I might try with future blocks.
I also made 4 blue Alamo Stars to add to the ongoing collection.
Hop over to SoScrappy and see what the quilters are sewing with their blue scraps.
A bit more of the blue stash has been tamed this week. Strips were cut and block pieces were organized for more Alamo Stars. Each star block needs 17 pieces cut from a 1.25" strip using 3 different rulers, so it takes a while to do the prep work.
Once I have the pieces cut for a block I use the Clover clips to keep them together.
Here is a handful of blocks all ready to go. They will be sewn using the leader/ender system in between sewing other things this week.
To see more blue scrap projects, hop over to SoScrappy.
Bonnie is hosting QuiltCam this afternoon so that's what I'll be doing. You can link up from the Quiltville website starting at 2 pm. Come be part of the "Soul Quilters" as Bonnie says:
We are “Soul Quilters” The Sisters & Brothers of the cloth –We understand each other’s need to sew as much variety as we can, to sew all the pieces that we can, to make something that says something about who we are and what we love.
