A few small projects

Yesterday I made some new curtains for the upstairs bathroom.  I've had the fabric for months, but just haven't gotten around to making them.  The café curtains - bottom curtain and valance - took about an hour to sew!   The walls are painted a soft lavender, but the previous curtains were a small pink print on white.  So the lavender didn't stand out very well.  Now the room has a rosy glow, which is supposed to make people look good.

Next I made a new bathmat, using an old towel and some orphan quilt blocks.  A few years ago, I participated in a scrappy heart block swap, resulting in a nice-sized throw with multicolored hearts.  I saved out two purples ones exactly for this bathmat.  Well, it takes a visit from my mother to light a fire under me!

This took an afternoon because I used the "quilt as you go" method and then added a little more quilting to anchor the top.
It's basically a small quilt because there's a piece of batting between the top and the bath towel which I cut down to size.  The lavender border matches the curtains.

Mom and Jenny arrive a week from today.  I need to get the basement ready for Jenny to sleep in, and I'll try very hard not to mess up the guest/sewing room before Mom gets here.  I am really looking forward to their visit!

Forest walks begin

Last Tuesday was our first walk in the Town Forest for the season.  We'll be leading nature walks on the 25 miles of trails through September.  Mainly, the same people come every week, but every now and then a new person or two joins us.  I also try to attend the every-other-Sunday walks with my friend, a former science teacher and photography buff.


There are Sundays when I have other things to do, but I always feel better walking these trails which change every week.  Right now, there is new growth everywhere and not as many flowers in the understory.  Yet the birds are very active.  We saw a downy woodpecker and heard a warbler, among others.

It has been beautiful weather this week, and yesterday's outing was very nice, with two couples and a sweet dog joining us.  One couple had retired to our area after living in Boston for 30 years - quite a change, but they are enjoying the peace and quiet.  And I enjoyed meeting them.  That's one of the benefits of leading these walks.

We took a fairly easy route, stopping by the #6 Quarry and then going up to Lawson's Lookout, which, like so many of the lookouts, is a former grout (Scottish for "waste") pile that has overgrown.  One hundred years ago, what is now forest was once a tree-less quarry works owned by various companies.  The trails were made by workers and then, as the quarries were abandoned, kept up by walkers, hunters, and wildlife.  Here is what the group found atop Lawson's Lookout.  She stayed up there a long time, trying to figure out how to get down.  My friend walked up to check and snapped this photo before we continued on our way.

Hope you had a lovely Sunday, too.

Plans for June-July

I usually keep a mental list of quilting plans and, with my mother and sister Jenny coming in a couple of weeks, I have been cleaning up the quilting/guest room and thinking about what I'm going to do this summer.  On hot days, I stay right in the quilting room with the AC on.

I want to make new curtains for the bathroom and have had a nice soft purple cotton since before our May 1 guest arrived.  "Life" keeps getting in the way, but we really need to replace the rain-spotted curtains we have.  I also want to make a new bathmat and saved out two purple pieced heart blocks from the heart quilt I made just for this purpose.  I think these were swap blocks from Debbie in Indiana, and the swap was ages ago!  I have a fat quarter set aside to go between the blocks and will also use scraps from the curtains.

Next on my agenda should be putting together the Ohio Star blocks I received in a guild swap.  There are 21, in all different colors, and the best setting may well be on-point with a deeper beige between each block and along the outside.  I have a tough time with on-point settings, but maybe this time I will master the math of the outside triangles.  The blocks are now in a project box, just waiting for Jane's 3 blocks and the setting fabric.  Interestingly enough, Paula told me this setting is what she's thinking about, too.  She and I have very different tastes, so I'm curious to see what she does.

My 70th birthday is at the end of July, and I would like to make a 71st year quilt with one or two 6" blocks each week.  I hope they will say something about my life or even what I might have done that week.  I have a copy of Pat Sloan's The Splendid Sampler and am following her Splendid Sampler 2 online along with Moda Blockheads 2 for block ideas.   Another project box has shirtings for the backgrounds all ready for whenever I feel like starting.

Then there are two hand projects - sewing yoyos onto black or white squares for the state quilt guild and a wool appliqued vase of flowers.  Both are nice for cooler summer days on the back porch.

Antelope Canyon

My online quilting friend Linda showed a photo of a quilt she finished, and I loved it.  Linda said she'd never make it again so gave me the pattern, called Antelope Canyon, by Laurie Shiffrin.  Hoffman has a cutting diagram for a different colorway, and Shiffrin has two color ways on her blog.  I had bought some black fabric last summer at our local quilt shop where the owner gives a birthday discount of half our age.  That's a great deal when one is approaching 70!

My quilt, which I started last Saturday, has bright colors on the black background.  Of course, I didn't have enough of last summer's black, so I bought a few yards of another black last week.  And the bright colors come from two jelly rolls I bought on sale from Craftsy.  It's from the Lily and Loom One Farmers Market line.

The work was definitely in the cutting, and I had to keep the strips organized with sticky notes on each set.  Some are 2.5" wide and some are 1.5" inches wide, which makes the curves once put together.   I removed one print because it was a dull gray and substituted a couple of leftover scraps from the jelly rolls.

The sewing is fairly straight-forward once everything is cut and marked, but the last rounds involve fairly long seams.  I know this because I had to take one set of four seams out and move them around 90 degrees.  I knew if I didn't, it would bother me forever.  

The finished size is about 75" x 75".  There are only four huge blocks which, close to the end, are a little difficult to handle with the small design wall I have.  So I have stacked them on the bed as I attach each round.  Only two and a half rounds to go.    Hope to finish today or tomorrow - I have a lot to do before my mom and sister arrive in a couple of weeks.  

Sampler finished!

I started this quilt in January, 2017, when I made some 6" Sylvia's Bridal Sampler blocks to swap.  The swap blocks were due in August, 2017, but I had received some nice fabric from my Mom who enjoys shopping for me at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum near her house.  I made Grandmother's Fan and Amethyst to swap with the fabric.  I forget what other blocks I made to swap.   But the blocks I received were super and added quite a nice variety to the quilt.  The group I work with is very careful about size and quality of stitching.   Everyone has her own taste in color, but the blocks all blended well.

When Moda started its Blockheads quilt along, I made some of those 6" blocks as well.  Some were really difficult and my 6" blocks looked terrible!  So I made them 9" and had no idea what I'd do with them - if anything.  I ended up keeping two and making a third block, the "Swamp Angel," to highlight a William Morris print from a charm pack I received somewhere along the line.

It's a bit of a memory quilt because the heart applique near the center is left over from some I made as samples for a beginning applique class I taught.  And our swap group started as a group that was working on Sylvia's Bridal Sampler.   One of our members is a person who was my "secret pal" during my Dear Jane days.  Many years ago now that was my obsession - I think I made three or four variations of Jane.

I quilted this mostly with my walking foot, first quilting the sashing with black thread and then each block individually in cream thread.  I tried stippling a few blocks and a little more free motion here and there, but all of the seams made it heavy and difficult to move around easily.  I cut the border with my "June Tailor" wave border template because the quilt is an odd size - a little too big for a throw but too small for a twin bed.  This way it can layer over another quilt or even a bedspread (I don't have any in my house!).

It does feel good to finish a project, and of course, as I'm quilting, I'm thinking of the next project or projects.  I started cutting pieces for that after I took this picture and am over the moon because it's raining today.  Are quilters the only people who enjoy rainy/snowy days?

Tulip convergence

I forgot to post a photo of the convergence wallhanging I made right after the Ricky Tims "Luminarium."  It must have been the heat and humidity!  Thursday it started to build and by Friday we just tried to keep cool all day.

I enjoyed working on this, partly because it went quickly.  The small (about 12" x 18") wallhanging took me an hour to put together from four 10.5" squares.  I had received the tulip fabric from Leigh in Australia and was waiting for a "special occasion."  I added three coordinating fabrics in order to cut the strips both horizontally and vertically.  Then I did a little fusible applique (which I am not fond of doing) and quilted in what I call a "fried egg spiral" (the center is wonky so the outer rings are wonky, too).

Tuesday I'm having lunch with Jane who I attended the class with.  I'll take my piece along to show her.  She's going to make a bed-sized convergence quilt, and I'll probably take notes.  I would love to try a bigger size but am wondering about proportions.   Cutting longer strips absolutely straight and then making sure all the seams match up will be crucial.