The Gifts That Keep on Coming

I’ve been gifted quite a bit of fabric and several projects recently from quilt customers:

• A bag of red, cream and tan fabrics, some large pieces
• 900 paper piecing hexagons, 1 1/4" per side
• A bag of assorted fabrics, including a bag of jelly roll strips that were partially cut and sewn and a set of partially pieced feedsack Dresden Plates
• A partially quilted Winding Ways quilt, needing a few repairs, lots of thread cleanup, batting fixed and borders quilted.

I have a gathering of red/beige/cream fabrics in the works for a bed-sized Disappearing 9-Patch, so the red, cream and tan fabrics will be mixed in.

The hexagons will allow me to try out some flowers with 1/3 hexagons as petals. I am too thrifty to spend $24 for a set of 1/3 hexagon paper pieces, so will make a template and cut my own from these.

The jelly roll strips are the Roman Holiday collection from Moda circa 2004. I really like the fabrics and am looking for a project that will showcase them, and also let me work with some partial strips.

 

I've had the Dresden Plates on my studio design wall for a couple of weeks, getting advice on using them to their best advantage. My initial thought is to applique them to a solid background (without any trimming behind) using a buttonhole stitch, and quilting them densely. The dark red pieces look likely to bleed, and there are several pieces where a blue fabric bled on some of the other pieces, so there needs to be some re-piecing. Also the arcs each have 11 pieces, and only 20 are needed for a full circle (the one completed circle with 22 pieces needs to be altered.)

The Winding Ways quilt has been getting a bit of thread cleanup, and I've been adding safety pins to areas where the quilting has gaps. The backing is large enough to allow me to quilt the borders on the longarm, once the batting is fixed (one side has too much and the other not enough.)

Oh - and then I won a set of fat quarters from Quilter's Newsletter!

Last of the Mystery Series Finished

The pull of the garden is very strong right now. My flowers peak in May, which means they want to be staked, weeded, watered. My tomato plants are in, spinach has already bolted, lettuces harvested and re-seeded, squash and beans just seeded and need to be kept moist.

Quilting and sewing is getting the 10-20-30 minutes approach that Nancy Zieman talks about – do a little at a time, even if it is just setting up for the next project. My attic sewing room is adjusting to my foster cat, and although she is an older kitty, she is exploring every shelf, basket and counter, and I’ve already misplaced a few projects that I stuffed somewhere so it wouldn’t become a nest or pile on the floor. Quick projects have included adding the last two borders to the Diamond Box quilt, sewing the binding strips and prepping the backing for same. And finally binding Mystery #3, size is 73.5" x 53.5", the largest of the three Mystery quilts.