Christmas

 A very Merry and Blessed Christmas to you all. I hope your day is wonderful.

Thanksgiving, a new quilt top and a sandwhich

 Hello Everyone,

I'm wishing my American readers an early Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you have a lovely day, filled with family, friends and good food.... even if you don't celebrate this holiday :) My family loves traditional Thanksgiving food, so my dd and I will be quite busy. We bake our pies on Wed and do traditional turkey, rolls, mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, corn, cranberries, salad and sometimes green beans or stuff mushrooms on Thursday. Our table will be groaning! 

I didn't mean to be gone for so long. One day it was early July and I was just puttering around, getting into Summer routine here in our logging business household, and the next thing I know it's Sept. And then BAMM it's the end of November. I don't know how the time got away so quickly.

We did have an adventure in late July/early Aug. and I guess that threw the time off for us all. The Park fire came close to our house, it burned soooo many acres and sooo quickly! We packed up our most precious things and convoyed out of here at 9pm on a Friday night. We went camping with our dogs at the logging site, so my family was still able to work and we had a camper and tents to live in. The best thing about camping was swimming in the lake whenever I wanted! So we have a lot to be thankful for this year. Our house and property were saved, we lost only some of our chickens, but not all of them. We had a place to go, even if was camping out, my gang still worked and we were all together.

But my health hasn't been as good this year. My energy level is low and I tire and get achy so very easily. I have an immune disease that is causing all my issues and I'm trying to get things together without using a lot of drugs. And it's a challenge.

But, I have done a bit of quilting/sewing. Let me show you, I left you with snaps of some small lone stars I was putting together. Some in blue:

Some in dusky pink:

Then I made these sashing strips:

I laid them all out on point, and the setting triangles are the light green as well. That blue background is very bright and the dusky pink helps to tone it down, but that green really helps to bring the two together nicely I think.

It makes a nice sized lap quilt, or a childs quilt. I might put a border on, I might not. All of the stars and the colorful patches in the sashings are from my scrap box, woohoo! ... although you can't tell as I have sooo many scraps! LOL... For now it got put away as I feel like quilting one of my very favorite tops.

I made this Irish Stars top (pattern) a year or so ago, and have always loved it. Earlier in the year I bought enough backing for 2 quilt tops, and this is the first one I'm going to quilt. I'm pinning it now. (For those who don't know, that's whats called a sandwhich: top, batting and backing being pinned/basted together.)

I got about 3/4 thru this and noticed that a bit of batting, almost in the center of the quilt, is bumped up a bit. SIGH~ that means I have to unpin part of it, smooth out the batting and repin. What  a pita! So I'll hopefully get to that sometime this week and finish pinning it.

Thanks for stopping by and sticking to the end of my long post. Blogger is being fussy, so I hope I can post this.

Dorian

A bit of mish mash going on

 Hello Everyone,

Hope you all are well and enjoying your days. It's a typical dry, warm summer day here. The temps have been bouncing between the low 80s to mid 90s, so not TOO hot.... but hot enough!

I've been doing some of this and that for the past few months in the sewing room, not a lot, but some.

I finished Charlotte Hawks scrappy mystery quilt, the top that is. (Sorry for the indoor picture, but it's pretty windy outside right now.) This was A LOT of fun! Thank you Charlotte!

I had a squirrel pop up on my table a month or so ago too. This is Checkerboard, by Lori Holt. It's a small top, just right for a little girl. Another fun scrappy quilt.

I noticed my strip pile was getting out of hand, so I decided to use my 1.5" strips and make some small Lone stars. I love making Lone stars, and haven't made any in quite some time.

I'm having fun making these too! The not so fun part is the background, of course. Lots of Y-seams. Which I can do, they just aren't as fun as the stars :)

These finish up around 10" square. This background is actually quite bright, this picture is a little dark. And I wasn't sure if I wanted a whole quilt this color. So I pulled out a dusky pink and will alternate the pink and blue. I think it will look great.

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In other quilty news. I was slightly disappointed as I had ASSUMED something that wasn't right. I had read the Jolly Jabber (Fat Quarter news) and had thought that when they said the June box was "plain peachy keen", I was hoping that meant there was some of Cori Yoders yummy fabric by that name in it. I got the box today and found it was some lovely fabric by Fig tree and Co. instead. This box has some nice things in it, a fun ruler and pins/needles. So all is well and I am happy with this birthday gift to myself.  I haven't bought a Sew Sampler box in a few years.

My sweet friend Carol sent me a few much needed rulers (something I dont' often buy myself) and this pattern, which I have been wanting every since it came out!! Thank you again my friend.

This is Sweetwaters Hello Spring pattern. And all of you who know me, know I love these bright, happy Sweetwater colors. This pattern looks fun as it's a mix of regular piecing and applique/embroidery.

My DD bought me this book:

It's all about taking one pattern and making  a variety of different bags with it, depending on what materials you use and how you embellish it. You all know I love making bags, so this will be fun to read and work with. She also bought me some faux leather and some bag hardware. So a new bag will be in my future :)

Now, to just get into the sewing room more and get some things done!

Thanks for stopping by.

Dorian

Progress on two projects

 Hello Everyone,

I hope you are all having a nice Spring. Ours is pretty typical: snow, sun, Tstorms, sun, rain, repeat :) The flowers are all starting to bloom, the redbud is blooming as is the lavender. The grass is green and trees are leafing out. Such a beautiful time of year.

I've been steadily working on the Scrappy mystery quilt from Charlotte Hawks. She has been giving us clues once a month for the past four months. Here is my progress.

The lighter gray is the background. The bit darker gray and red is what she calls borders. I didn't use any gray/black or red in the blocks, so as not to distract with the background/borders the same color.

Block 1: That darker gray was supposed to be black, but... it isn't really.

Block 2:

Block 3: the lighter gray is the background

Block 4: The next few blocks will look similar, but have a few small differences.

Block 5:

Block 6:

We have one more block that is partial completed, finishing clue is next month, so I'll show it when it's done. Then I think we'll be putting it all together.

I have to say, I am having a LOT of fun with this quilt!! I have 3 small drawers that have my scraps that are less then 1/4 yrd, but bigger than 5". So I've been cutting triangles as I go. Trying to get a lot of variety. The only problem with that is....

I have MORE triangles now to deal with, ugh!! I have a baggy full of triangles, one day I keep telling myself I do something with them, but still haven't gotten around to it. Although I have saved a few patterns that deal with scrappy triangles.

The other pattern I'm working on is Edyta's birthday quilt. This is a series of 6" blocks, one a week for most of the year. With a few bonus blocks thrown in, so far they have been applique.

Blocks 1-6 (they all need to be pressed and trimmed)

Blocks 7-12

Blocks 13-16 plus one bonus block. Those sweet hearts is the bonus block, I haven't done the first bonus block yet.

I'm having a lot of fun with this quilt too. I've never done a sampler type quilt, but I am having fun picking out the fabrics for each block. The fabric is from Corey Yoder, and I really love this fabric line! The blue comes from one of her other lines, so it goes really well with the other colors.

So this is what I've been doing, mostly. Just puttering on these blocks and starting a few other little scrappy projects.

Have a great day, thank you for stopping by.

Dorian

On my sewing table

And what a messy table it is!  Hello Everyone,

As you can see, I have a few projects on going here. Having lots of fun with them all.

This one is the scrappy mystery project from Charlotte Hawks Quilts. This is only one of the blocks we have done so far.

I'm working on clue #3 right now. It's fun playing with all these scraps!

This lovely pile of fabrics is Buttercup and Slate, by Corey Yoder. And the bottom blue is from Corey also, it's from her Peachy Keen line. My best online quilting buddy, Pat from the scrapatch, gifted it to me :) It's the perfect background for those lovey grays, yellows and greens.

I'm using the above stack in Edyta Sitars birthday mystery quilt. Here is my stack of the first 10 blocks.

Edyta is doing one block a week, for most the year. So my first sample type quilt. There is some embroidery blocks thrown in as bonus blocks too.

This sweet pile is for a project bag swap we are doing on the QATW forum. I am loving how this is turning out!

I am not so happy with this next project. I started doing it EPP fashion, but was unhappy with my whip stitching, so took it out and sewed it together with my machine. As you can see, the outer ring is a bit bigger than it should be, it's just basted on, so it will be easy to take off and see if I can fix it. Not sure how though...

This is called Sugar plum by Judy Newman. The rose is going to be the middle and then there will be some outer pieces to make the block square. I can see I need to be better at my 1/4 inch seams...I'm guessing that's why my outer block came out larger than it should be. Pat had some template material and she generously traced the shapes out for me and sent the templates along. She rightly thought that this would be an intriqueing block for me :)

I'm enjoying some lovely sunny days. I get afternoon sun in my sewing room and I love sitting in there with the radio softly playing, while I play with my fabric.

Have a lovely weekend! And thanks for stopping by.

Dorian

A scrappy New Year

 Good morning Everyone,

I can't believe it's already into Feb. The days are just flying by, although they are not busy days. How does that work? lol So a Happy belated New Year to you all, I hope it's a good one for you.

I've been working with my scraps a lot lately. It started at the end of last year with these little 9-patches.

These are made with my 1.5" square scraps. I had made a little lap quilt with some black scraps earlier last year, and wanted to work with them some more.

With this pattern, I wanted to see if I could use up some of my triangle scraps. I have a lot of these, and tend to just leave them in a baggie and not use them. But most of my triangle scraps were the wrong size for this design. So I used some larger squares and cut them on the diagonal, matching the colors in the 9-patch.

This is also a small lap size. With a border it would make a nice wheel chair sized quilt. I was happy to use the last of this beautiful black with flowers fabric scrap on the outside.

Then I took out these tiny triangle scraps.

These are from a quilt a few years ago that used a square put on the corner of a larger square, and made a triangle in the corner. Like when doing a snowball block. The white with swirls is from my favorite Sweetwater line, so I couldn't throw them away :) Once trimmed, they are 1.5" HST's.

I was going to make them into a mug rug. I was going to keep it for myself, something sweet to look at. But then, as I was sewing, the little pieces said they wanted to be part of something else....

I then had to add a pretty little flower and butterfly... I love adding bits of embroidery/applique to things.

then I turned it into this sweet little bag. Side 1

Side 2

And now it has some yummy sweet treats in it, and is going to be flying off to live with a dear friend instead  of staying home with me :)

I love making little gifts like this.

I also decided to make the scrappy mystery quilt from Charlotte Hawks. She is using lots of triangles. I was, again, hoping to use some of my scrappy triangles, but mostly the triangles the pattern uses are much larger then what I have saved. 

But that's ok, as I have lots of under 1/4 yard scraps that are easily cut into these triangles.

This is the first blocks. Very scrappy. The red and the dark gray are the constants, something to mellow out all the scrappiness a bit.

This is a once a month clue pattern... sigh~ I hate waiting for the next clue, but I am enjoying playing with these scraps.

Have a lovely day, thank you for dropping by,

Dorian