Ponderance

I got these 10 fat quarters as a gift and want to turn them into a lap quilt (60"x60") but haven't a clue what pattern.

• I love the colors, but I have no stash fabrics to go with them
• Budget restraints = not buying coordinates
• Have white in the stash.  Maybe little bits of yellow.
• Large scale print suggests pieces at least 5"
• I want enough piecing to make it look interesting 

Do you have a favorite pattern that fits these criteria?  Leave me a comment with a link to the quilt you're thinking of.

Fresh Sewing Day

I haven't participated in Fresh Sewing Day at Lily's Quilts for quite a while.  And I'm even late posting as my life has been pretty crazy lately.

I've spent most of the month working on the hand quilting on this quilt.  It's my variation of Esther Aliu's Heart's Desire.   I've been working on the hand quilting since the beginning of November.

In February, I finished the Sashiko style diamond fill and am about 1/4 finished with the outer two borders. 

I'd probably finish faster if I didn't get so much help. 

I also  finished this scrap flimsy I'm calling Sun & Stars.  It will be a gift for one of my nephews. 

It was my attempt to use the scraps from 6 yellow quilts.  If you're interested you can see the pictures of them in this post. 

This was an amazing process for me as I am deathly afraid of scrap quilts.  Mixing all those colors and shapes that don't go together just makes me queezy.  

I didn't get more quilting done this month because I kept getting distracted by fun things like this baby beanie. Seems like the perfect gift for a breastfed baby.    You can find the pattern here. 

I am also involved in a cooking challenge with my friend Joe.  These were ingredients that I had on hand and challenged him to make a meal with at least 4 out of 6 of these.  The meal has to include all the food groups.  He can buy these ingredients, but everything else he adds has to be in the house at the time he receives the challenge.  

I have revived my Nutrition Blog to post our progress and recipes. I promise it will be amusing to follow as I also accepted a sub-challenge to make something with Tic Tacs (breath mints) and cardamom since he claimed it was all he had at his house.  I have my first Tic Tac recipe posted and have 4 to follow.  

Distractions

The problem with being pathologically creative is that it's easy to be distracted by other projects.  One of my friends posted this Baby Boobie Beanie (for breastfed babes) on the Pirate Hookers FaceBook group and I knew I had to make one.

I did contemplate how amusing it might be to make a bikini top....

And the teenager decided she and her BFF wanted to be big boobie heads.

OK....I promise to get back to quilting...after the other beanie is finished.

Hoopless

I'm down to the outer 11" of border and I've decided to go hoop-less.

Which is helpful as my cat, who isn't a lap cat...unless she's cold and wet (as apparently I am warm and absorbant)....

spent the morning homesteading my lap and tenderizing my mid-sections.

It is at least theoretically possible to quilt around her without disturbing her much needed sleep.

Sun & Stars

Today I had intended to work on my taxes.

Instead, I actively procrastinated by finishing the yellow scrap quilt.
Overall, I'm quite happy with how it turned out.  The flimsy measures 73" x 90.  I used up all of the grey, most of the yellows and some odd black & whites.  Fortunately, I still have lots of "good" black and whites for another quilt.

I thought I was going to be all done by about 10am.

I was so happy as I finished the 16" wide misc strip....until I discovered that the strip that I had used to determine the length was 18" too short.

Which is quite a conundrum as I no longer had an assortment of yellow strips to frame a black square.  And I really don't have any other blacks that would have made interesting centers.  Oh, and there was only a tiny pile of oddly shaped grey pieces.

My solution ended up being two 8.5" squares made up of every scrap I had left.  It includes some strangely curved pieces left over from a double wedding ring.  And there's A LOT of spray starch forcing them into anything even remotely flat.

Fortunately, I still had a selection of black & whites to lengthen the 16" wide strip...but there was some seam ripping involved to make it all look intentional.

A closer look at these fabrics brings back memories of the original quilts.

The HST that make up the sawtooth border and the pinwheels are leftover from a miscalculation on the pillow cases that I made for my sister-in-law Di

Which I made to go with this Sunshine quilt which I gave her as a surprise when she married my brother.

The section of 2" squares were left over from the OooRah! Quilt.

I had tried to clear out the gold fabric from my stash a couple years ago by putting together a quilt-as-you-go Autumn quilt.  That quilt started as a crazy patch, then evolved into strips.

That project is still in progress as a practice piece for  FMQ.

What was left from laying out the project above, turned into strips for this baby quilt to try a different quilt-as-you-go project.

I think there are lots of the leftover strips in the piano key strips on the right of the new quilt as well as the framing of the black squares.

There are also a few bits of fabric that were left over from this quilt group project where I turned someone else's  leftovers into this donation quilt.


Now all that I have left is a small stack of yellow crumbs that I can see using as applique flower centers, a few dozen strips to go into my "strings" box, and I got brave and allowed myself to throw a hand full of not-very-pretty bits in the trash.

Time for some hand quilting while I contemplate how to quilt this flimsy.

Hurray!

It's taken 3.5 months and a couple hundred hours but the center 48" x58" section of this quilt is finally finished.  The time is purely an estimate based on the fact that in addition to 2 months of football, I also watch 110 episodes of LA Ink while I stitched.  I need to find another mindless series on Netflix that doesn't demand that I pay much attention, but helps to pass the time.

Yesterday, I moved on to the two outside borders.  I'm stitching in the ditch on the triangles, and adding straight (ish) lines on the green border.  After stitching on the white fabric, I'm finding the green batiks to be challenging to keep my stitches small.  I'm using a coated, dark green Coats & Clark quilting thread I had in the stash.  It is too thick to fit in my 12 needles that zip through the tight weave.  The new 11's I bought sew like a pudgy 10 so I'm in a bit of a pickle.

For those of you who are wonderful enough to leave comments, you may notice some changes.  I tried dropping the confirmation message, but I was getting tons of spam - mostly on old posts.  This morning I tried taking away the verification but adding a sign in requirement (Open ID or Google) which doesn't allow for anonymous comments.  No spam yet today so hopefully this will be a successful compromise.

Phobias

It's a shame that my real world friends Emily & JoAnne are Blog Lurkers instead of participating in the Bloggosphere of Quilting.  Because then they could attest to the fact that in The Real World, I am dangerously spontaneous.  And yet, I am deathly afraid of scrap quilts.

In the real world, I learned to ride a motorcycle 10 months ago. I bought a Big Ass 1800cc bike to learn on and I spend sunny days riding with a group of people that thinks that "high of 50 degrees" (10C) is enough of an excuse to ride.

But scraps...

Dude.

I'm OK if I can keep them well behaved, which generally means "limited palate" and "rules".

Here's the design wall for my yellow & grey quilt.
The left side are the random bits leftover from some 
strips from the other sections.

Today I started putting together the predominantly white with black bits, as well as some of the wider strips of yellow in the hopes that I could put together a 16" wide strip, 90" long ...that wouldn't freak me out.

I seem to Do OK if I break it down into sections were the randomness is less annoying.

Here, you can see where I sewed the individual sections into sets of 2-3.

This is me, trying to tame the scraps.

Based upon what I see on-line, I'm afraid that I am the only quilter with color-mixing-scrappiness-issues.  Please let me know if I am not alone, and you are interested in joining my support group.