High Fiber, No Calorie Donuts a.k.a. Finishes #29 and #30

 It's easy to get rapid finishes when the quilts are all basted. This week I finished twin quilts.

The quilts are about as close to identical as I get. Some of the blocks are the same, the background is the same, and they are the same size, even the backing fabric is the same. I had a bunch of 3.5" strips to bust and this is a simple block to make quick work of busting those strips. I made a bunch of blocks with white backgrounds too, and those will be getting assembled into quilt tops soon. 

I'm also working on another set of twin quilts. I've got one quilted, and I started quilting the second one today. Once they are both quilted I'll bind them one after the other. After having my Janome in the shop for 6 weeks, I thought there was NO chance I'd make my goal of finishing 40 quilts this year, but now I'm thinking I'll at least be close, or possibly even make it. We'll see. 

I've been working on processing those scraps I showed last week. 

This is the quilt kit I made myself from the plaids and narrow solid strips. I added some blender strips from stash, because I didn't want to cut into yardage, but I had some blenders in my scrap user system I could cut down into 1" strips. I did need to use a few shirt pieces to add to the plaids to get the quilt size I wanted. 

I also cut up all the bright colored scraps and cut those to size. I haven't cut the background color yet, so I'm not calling it a quilt kit yet, but I did write myself a note with what I need to cut from solid white for that quilt. 

Currently, I'm cutting up the autumn colored scraps, and I'm hoping it will be 100% scraps too, just like the plaid quilt. I also chose patterns for the red and blue quilts I'll be cutting from scraps. 

These were the September units for the Greek Murder Mystery quilt. I think the idea of the murder mystery quilts are awesome, and reading a book written to go with the quilt as the year goes on is very fun. The only thing I don't like about it is the designer and I have very different methods of getting things done. I like to cut accurately, sew and it's done. I use a lot of specialty rulers to help me do that. The designer doesn't want to require purchasing specialty rulers, which completely makes sense, since there are a lot of new quilters every year doing her mysteries. Also taking the new quilters into consideration, she does a lot of oversized piecing than trimming down to size, which is NOT my preference, I kind of hate doing it that way. To make these units, the designer had everyone doing Seminole piecing, which wastes a lot of fabric, so a lot of women ran out of fabric and had to use substitute fabrics to finish the units.

After running through her cutting instructions, I didn't have enough pink fabric left to do it that way either. I used my Ominigrid On Point ruler to cut the center squares, my EZ Companion Angle ruler to cut the side setting triangles, and my EZ Angle HST ruler to cut the corner triangles. I ended up with fabric left over, I sewed it up, it came out the correct size, and I only had a few dog ears for waste instead of large waste pieces.

Honestly, the mysteries are a lot of fun, and if you 1) enjoy paper piecing and/or oversized piecing and trimming down, you'd love the designers instructions (in the facebook groups one of the moderators makes paper piecing patterns available for all of the blocks) or 2) if you are experienced enough to tweak the method to your preferred methods like I am, you'll do fine with the Murder Mystery Quilts. I don't plan on doing the mystery quilt next year, because I would rather tackle more UFO's next year, so I'm not planning on doing ANY mystery quilts next year, not even Bonnie Hunter's which I do more often than not. 

I've been trying to be good and not buy fabric unless it's for an imminent project, but I went and looked at Hobby Lobby's clearance section today, and these fat quarter bundles were marked down to $4.99. Each bundle has 5 fat quarters, and fat quarters for $1 each are pretty much extinct these days, so I splurged. Almost nine yards of fabric for $35? Yeah, I'm going to take advantage of that. 

I'll have two of the grands for half of next week, and they are off school for fall break, so that should be fun spending time with them. DH will be busy all weekend with The Scooter Zine, so I can get some extra sewing in this weekend, which might make up for the no sewing days while we have the grands. I bet I can still get some of those scraps cut up with the grands here, so even though I may not be sewing, I'll still be doing something!