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 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

I'm not sure what this block is called

 Hello all,

It's quite smoky here this morning, there is a large fire burning to the East of us. Far enough away to not worry about it, but the wind is blowing right toward us. Our logging site is up there... I hope the fire doesn't turn towards it. 

I've been working on these blocks on and off all year. I'm not sure what they are called, and I can't seem to find the site I saw them on. I do recall noticing them on more than one blog, but I guess I didn't save a link to one, like I thought I did.

I had a stack of the white with gray fabric squares that had been cut 1/8" too small. And I had a pile of the bigger, yellow squares, that had been cut 1/4" too small. 

I was happy that when I put 2 of the whitish blocks together (with 2 colored squares I cut), into a 4 patch, that 4 patch is the same size as the yellow squares :)

So I got out my square scrap box. It has lots of 2" squares, plus some 1 1/2", 3" and 3 1/2" squares in it, all ready to be used in  a scrappy quilt. I took some colorful 2" squares and cut 1/8" off two sides, put them together with the whitish squares. Got some 3 1/2" squares and cut them down a 1/4", along with the yellow squares. I ran out of the whitish/gray squares and went thru my scraps finding white to cut up. And I had myself some fun :)

I mixed some floral prints in there and cut some more yellows, and now I'm laying the blocks out, figuring how I want it to look.

If anyone knows what this block is called, give a shout out in the comments please.

I'm going to set these aside now though, as I have to finish my youngest son's quilt. I don't have much more to do.

I'm linking up with Pat in the scrapatch again. Thank you Pat for your weekly link up. Have a great day everyone.

And thanks for stopping by,

Dorian