My Husband, Crash

My husband has earned a new nickname, I'm calling him Crash now. He had his third scooter accident yesterday, this time earning a broken elbow and maybe wrist. We're going to a specialist today and they will reevaluate the x rays. I'm thankful he wasn't hurt more severely, and since it's his right arm and he's left handed it's not so bad.

I finished the small stars for the scooter rally quilt while Mr. S was napping yesterday and DH was having his x rays taken. I needed to stay busy so I wouldn't worry.

I finished the last quilt top I'm making with 4" flannel squares, in fact, this quilt is far more denim than flannel.

Here are my last 10 flannel squares. SHHH, don't tell the scrap police but I am throwing them away. My creativity has run dry on what to do with these.

What flannel do I have left? I have 22 5" squares. I am pairing 21 of those with 21 denim squares and making one more small quilt top. The last square goes in the trash guilt-free. I have a few orphan blocks made with flannel, but I've already pieced them together to use in the backs of these quilts. My flannel container is now EMPTY!

Progress on the Flannel Front and a Sneak Peek...

Here is another flannel/denim top. In this top one only the white and floral squares are flannel. Using denim in these has really stretched the flannel into a lot of tops. This quilt top reminds of of my mother's blue and white china dishes we used on holidays.


In this next one every other square is flannel, mostly purples and yellows. I couldn't find a purple or yellow fabric I liked for the border, so I started just looking for any fabric I had that had purple and yellow in it. I settled on the butterflies.


Here is a sneak peek at the quilt for the scooter rally. These blocks are for the outer border. I have all the blocks for the outer border done, and now I'm working on different star blocks for an inner border. The fussy cut centers of these blocks are from the fabric I'll be using to back the quilt.


Look what I found in the pumpkin patch! My mom made these cute pumpkin hats, so here are the twins modeling them. In the top photo Mr. L is on the left, with Miss S on the right. In the bottom photo they are opposite. They certainly don't look like skinny little preemies anymore!

Adventures in Paper Piecing

Paper Piecing.

The words just put fear and confusion in my head. No matter how many times I read the directions, it just made no sense to me. I finally went to youtube in search of a tutorial that made it click for me. I found one too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uaW26igygE&feature=fvst

Finally, something I could see that made sense to me. It's not that I've never foundation pieced, I do that for string blocks and I've used Thangles, so the paper didn't bother me. It was the how do I figure out how to cut the pieces for paper piecing to work. The first block I tried, I did wrong and had to start over. I ran short in one pointy section. Now I've made a couple of paper pieced blocks, and I'm doing better. It feels good to finally be developing a skill I found intimidating. Last year my goal was to do some free motion quilting, and I did quite a bit of it, and this year I learned to paper piece.

See this carnage? It is the remnants of ONE 12" paper pieced block. It was a pretty complicated block, at least to me. I can't show you the finished block yet. In a few months I will. I'm doing some testing for something not published, so I can't show anything until it is published and available.

I have been working on a couple more flannel quilts. I'm so glad I'm coming to the end of that flannel! I'm hoping by the end of the weekend, I'll have a good bit of the rally quilt sewed, and the flannel quilt tops finished. My goal is rally quilt first, then the bags and cool ties. I'll be finishing the flannel quilts as leaders/enders. One needs borders, and the other two are in rows.

So Much Fabric, So Much Fun!

This store is just a few miles from my house. It's not in a pretty building, things are not all lined up and organized, but goodness, do they have some good deals! The store is SAS Fabrics, and if you can sew with it, they probably have it. DH and I went there on Saturday, looking for some snake fabric for DGS#1 new I Spy quilt. I've already checked a few other stores in town and hadn't had any luck. Well, I still didn't get any snake fabric, but I bet they had some, I just didn't find it.

I have been very conservative about buying fabric since my year of no-buy, and I've pretty much only gotten things I was going to use immediately, but Saturday, DH and I dug through stacks of fabric, and I bought some great remnants for no other reason than I liked them.

These are all one yard and under pieces, some as little as 8 inches.

These pieces I haven't folded yet, because I need to cut some squares for DGS quilt. Nothing here more than about 14 inches.

These four pieces I bought at least 2 yards each. The pirate parrots and the dragon fabric I bought 5 yards each. After a scrub top for DH, I'll have either enough left for pajama pants or to put in a quilt as a focus fabric.

Only the pirate and dragon fabrics were more than $3.99 a yard. They are incredibly generous when measuring, so I actually got much more fabric than I paid for. Everyone that works there is so nice, and this store is just a blast. I haven't been in there for quite a while, because the easiest way to avoid buying fabric is to avoid fabric stores. DH had as much fun searching for novelty fabrics as I did. He has a vested interest in anything I get yardage of, since it may end up as new scrub top for him.

I had something I really need to get sewed this weekend, but it didn't happen. I did finally get the curtains made for the nursery, so something got done. I'll have to really lock myself in the sewing room on Tuesday morning and all day Thursday to have a chance to finish things on schedule. I'm babysitting tomorrow, and I have to watch the twins on Tuesday afternoon so DD#3 can go to her doctor appointment. Today my sister came down to visit, and on Wednesday, DH's sister will be here. With all of that going on, plus normal upkeep of a household of eight, and I'm going to be a busy lady this week.

Will the Flannel Never End?

When I decided to bust all my flannel last year, I had no idea how long that would take. After all, I didn't have that much flannel, so I thought. Also, most of these are just baby quilts, since the colors I had were mostly baby or juvenile. Baby quilts don't use that much fabric, and since none of flannel pieces were big, I am using regular cotton for the borders, and later for the backs. For the top quilt, I used all of the 4 1/2" (unfinished) blocks I had, mixing four patches with paddle wheel blocks. I only have a 2 1/2" strip left of the border fabric :-)


Now I am down to 4" squares, and I am making real progress on those, but the more quilts I make, the more creative I am having to be to combine them. These fabrics weren't bought to go together, and I only ever bought flannels from thrift stores or remnant bins, so I didn't usually have very large pieces to start with. I like the Trip Around the World pattern with the pinks and greens, but I had a horrible time finding a border fabric. I finally decided the Easter egg fabric had all the colors I wanted, and nothing else in my stash did, so I went for it!


This quilt top I finished this evening. It will be the last of just flannel squares. I'm going to go back to mixing flannel and denim for the rest. On this diagonal set quilt I was laying it out based on how many squares of each fabric I had, only two, it goes there, seven squares so it can go here. It's a crazy way to lay out quilts. If I had a bigger variety of flannels I would have tried for an anything goes quilt, but I just don't have the variety I'd need to be happy with that approach.

This has been a crazy year for quilting for me. It is March already and I don't have a quilt finish for the year :-( I really need to spend some time cutting this week. I have to make a quilt, 72 rally bags, and 40 cool ties for DH's scooter rally in eight weeks. Nothing like sewing under pressure, huh? I have my cutting plan for the quilt written out, and once I get everything cut, piecing it shouldn't be bad. I didn't pick anything very complicated. I'm going for a medallion quilt this time, and I've never made one of those so it should be fun. I was hoping to get some cutting done today, but I ended up babysitting instead.

My flannel is slowly but surely coming to an end. I think that mixed with denim squares, I'll end up with three more baby quilts, but then it should be gone. I know I'll end up with more flannel scraps later on, I do have people request flannel quilts, but for now, I'm close to finishing.

One thing I really have noticed? I am noticing dents in my my one yard and under sections. I've been looking through those first when deciding on borders for these baby quilts. I only need 4 WOF strips to border the quilts the size I'm making them, so on several of these, I'm just measuring the fabric and dividing by four to pick border size. I'm completely used up several fabrics making these little quilts. Maybe when I have my grand quilting spree later in the year, I'll notice some dents in yardage as I back all of these quilt tops I've been making!