Basting Spree with Frankenbatting

 Before I tackle my cotton batting scraps, I wanted to baste all the poly Frankenbattings I had matched up with quilt tops. As you can see, I have one quilt laid out ready to baste. The pile under the window holds nine basted quilts. Next to the big pile of basted quilts is one more quilt to be basted, after I piece a backing for it, and I have yet another quilt that I basted in the sewing room on my quilting table. I've been quilting too, so I am repurposing pins as soon as I take them out of whatever I'm quilting at the time. 

I think I have enough larger pieces of batting scraps that I might be able to make the batting that I hadn't matched up with a top large enough to match a quilt top. The smallest poly batting scraps I'm saving for a pillow form, the heavily pieced scraps I'm tossing guilt free. At some point it needs to hit the end of the line. 

One thing I did before I tackled the poly batting scraps at all, was to go through my fabric shelves and pull out any yardage I wanted out of my stash. A lot of those are novelty fabrics left from the scrub top days, when I was making them on commission. I'm at the point where if no one in my immediate family is interested in whatever is on the novelty fabric, and I don't like it well enough to make a quilt based on it, even for donation, I want it out of the house. I knew I could make a bunch of pillowcases from those fabrics and donate those, and that still may happen, but right now, I've been using as many as those fabrics as I can in the quilt backings I've been piecing. 

A lot of my donation quilts are scrappy, most are color controlled in some manner. For example, the one on the table to be basted is autumn colors. If there is a fabric in my stack of unwanted fabrics that matches the front at all, I'm using it for a backing. I'm still having to add more fabric to make the backings wide enough, so I'm going into my under 1 yard drawers looking for anything I can add to the main fabric to add a center strip of contrasting fabric to the backing. All in all, it's stashbusting at it's finest. Scrap quilt tops, frankenbatting, and fabrics I want out of the stash for the backings. The fabrics I'm using aren't ugly or sub-par in quality, they just aren't fabrics I'm excited about making a focus. When I was buying fabrics for scrub tops, I usually purchased 2.5 yards, so if it's a small throw, I can sometimes piece the whole backing from the fabric, but mostly I'm adding to them. 

My pile of scraps from the new backings is piling up, so I'll have to tackle cutting scraps again, but it's definitely manageable right now. I'd like to baste until I'm out of pins, so once that happens, I'll tackle the backing scraps. I'm not using any widebacks for these quilts, my personal rule of thumb is that if the quilt top isn't at least a twin sized, I would prefer piecing yardage rather than wasting wideback on it. I have more than enough pins to baste these two poly Frankenbatt quilts, so perhaps I'll be basting things made with cotton Frankenbatts soon, I'll be on my last jar of pins by then, so we'll see. Out of my four jars of pins, I've got one full jar left, and less than half of another. Depending on how it works out with quilting new quilts and reclaiming pins, and when I actually start with the cotton batting, could go several ways. 

Baby Sunflower Quilt- Finish #10

 I am actually keeping up with my goal of finishing two quilts per month!  This is my latest finish.

I had leftover bits from the big sunflower quilt I made. I managed to use them up in this baby quilt. I've got a great niece or nephew on the way, and I already had a baby boy quilt set aside for that baby, then I started thinking girl, so I finished this one. Now when they have the gender reveal, I'll be ready either way! 

I quilted the same freeform sunflowers I quilted on the larger quilt. I even used the same thread color because I was happy with how it looked on the big quilt. 

I sewed a crochet hook roll for one of my granddaughters, but I was in such a hurry to get it in the mail for her birthday, I completely forgot to take a photo. If you are in need of one of those, I used this tutorial, which was easy to follow. 

Civil War Progress

 All of my Civil War reproduction fabrics are now cut into strips, for the patterns I'm currently cutting. Most of the strips are normal sizes, only the 1.25" strips are odd for me. If this is too much fabric for what I am making, no worries, with these sizes of strips I have a lot of options. Since my goal is to bust all of this fabric this year, I may as well cut it into strips. 

The 1.25" strips were turned into four patches.

For the Trail Mix quilt, one of the blocks needed these tiny four patches, and another needed the tiny four patches plus 3" nine patches.

I lost count and have a few extra of both of those, but I never worry about extra units, they all get used eventually, and I already know I need to make a table runner from these fabrics, so extra units will likely end up there. 

As I'm cutting for the second two quilts, I'm clipping everything for each block together, and putting the fabrics in the tote bag. Trail Mix uses five different blocks, but the third quilt I'm making is repeats of one of those blocks, I'm almost done cutting Trail Mix, then I'll just be cutting the last block until I'm out of the correct sized strips for it. 

I've already put my 2.5" and 1.5" strips downstairs for now. I've used all I needed from them for now, so these will become another project. These strip sizes play together nicely, so no worries on that front. When I decide what I want to do with them, I may go ahead and cut the project, or I might just make notes and cut it later. I've got several leader/ender projects cut right now. so until I make progress on those, these strips can wait. 

As far as the Civil War Sampler quilt for DD#1 goes, I've finished sewing the scrappy sashing and scrappy cornerstones. The purple in the bottom of that basket will be the setting triangles. The pattern shows scrappy setting triangles, but I usually prefer them to match, so I bought some yardage.

I've got ten of the sampler blocks done now. I'd like to have this done for Christmas, but we'll see. It's not my main project, I'm doing it as leader/enders as much as possible. 

Now that I've used the 1.25" strips, and I put aside the remaining 2.5" and 1.5" strips, I'm only working with 2" and 3.5" strips. I'll keep cutting until I'm out of these strips. I'm sure I'll have a stack of squares of each size leftover, but I plan on cutting as efficiently as I can to get the most blocks as I can. Not all of the Sampler quilt blocks will be good leader/enders, but the blocks I'm cutting now will all work quite well in that role. 

Even if I don't show this project for a bit, know that it's being sewn in the background. 

Finish #9

 Things are moving along here. I needed to make another scooter quilt, because DH added another scooter rally to his business trip. I had one cut out, and now it's finished. 

I really like doing split borders on Attic Windows quilts. I feel like it really brings the interior design to the border. 

I've been doing a lot of non-quilting related stuff too. DD#2 and I have been been splitting produce boxes from a no food waste program. You get 70 pounds of produce for $20. You don't get a choice of produce, it just whatever there is excess from at restaurants and grocery stores that donate. 

We did it two weeks in a row, so we had 70 pounds of produce each over the two weeks, even splitting boxes. Since the produce needs to used immediately, we've both been meal planning around what's in the boxes, but there's still too much to be used right away. Good thing I'm an old pro at freezing produce. Needless to say, there's been a lot of blanching, ice baths, and chopping of stuff around here.

I made a big batch of salsa verde from the tomatillos I got, and last night we had Salsa Verde chicken made in the slow cooker. Today I froze the remaining salsa verde, some in an ice cube tray so we'd have small amounts for eggs, and the rest in the amount I need for salsa verde chicken. DH wants salsa verde chicken burritos next time, last night I served it over cilantro lime rice. Burritos are tricky since he's gluten-free. So many of the GF tortillas fall apart. I'm thinking I might try making an enchilada casserole type thing with the salsa verde chicken. I've got enough salsa verde in the freezer to make it several times, so I can experiment a bit. 

I tried making a raw Brussel Sprout slaw, and it's pretty good, the recipe I used called for dried cherries, but I subbed cherry flavored craisins because they were half the price. I had the sliced almonds the recipe called for, so no problem there. Usually I roast Brussel sprouts, but we had a bunch of those last week, so I wanted something different. 

I froze some tomatoes to use in sauce later on, and I actually tried freezing cucumbers in a sugar brine, which I had never tried before. I froze some green beans that I'll cook up on Mother's Day, they wouldn't have lasted a week in the fridge. I also froze a bunch of bell peppers, some sliced for slow cooker fajitas, and some diced for our frequent Cajun dishes. DH and I like our food spicy, so Cajun and Mexican foods are a regular around here. 

Tonight or tomorrow night I'm going to turn a stuffed acorn squash recipe into more of a casserole. I've always found eating stuffed vegetables fiddly, so I'll take the same ingredients, but cut them up and layer them. I'm using Italian sausage and spinach with the acorn squash, and I think it will be delicious. 

I've been reverse meal planning for a while now, always looking at what food we have in the house, and basing our meals on that instead of deciding on a menu and buying all the stuff for that. Reverse meal planning saves us a lot of money, and it keeps us from wasting food that we already paid for. By meal planning in reverse and freezing extra meals I can usually skip the grocery shopping one week a month, which again, helps us save money. Having meals in the freezer also gives me more sewing time, which is another win! 

Finish #8

 Here we are, the end of April, and I'm going to show you finish number 8 for 2026! So far I'm keeping up with my goal of averaging two quilt finishes per month.

This quilt top has been hanging in the quilt closet for quite a while. It wasn't hanging there because I didn't like it, quite the opposite. This quilt is one I designed, and I like it a lot, so I wanted to make sure this went to a special person. I finally decided on a recipient, so it was time for it to move to to the front of the quilting queue. 

The sunflower fabric was actually what was left from some table runners I made for a wedding several years ago. To cut the table runners to the size we needed, I ended up with about a nine inch long narrow strip down the length of the several yards of fabric leftover. I cut the very long narrow strip into 8.5" squares, then played around in EQ to find an alternate block I liked. The edges were a bit tricky, because using full blocks to the edge left the design feeling unfinished. I opted to make modified half blocks along the edges to fix that issue to my satisfaction.

Choosing a thread color was tricky. The border and some of the fabrics are dark, but the cream background is very light. I auditioned a cream, several yellows, and a light green that had a hint of blue. The cream and yellows showed up way too much on the dark colors, and the teal was stark on the cream. The light green worked best for what I wanted on this quilt. Sometimes I purposely go for a lot of contrast, but that wasn't what I wanted on this quilt. 

I really wanted to quilt sunflowers on this quilt, and I've never quilted sunflowers before, but that's never stopped me before. I used a 90" wide minky for the backing, so I knew the quilting. was really going to show on the back. It's not perfect, I kept changing how I travelled to put a new sunflower where I wanted it. By the time I was finished the quilting, I had settled on which method I preferred to travel with this design, but if the recipient looks closely, they'll see variances in different sections of the quilt.

You can see the light green wasn't too harsh against either the dark or the light areas. 

My sunflowers got pretty stylized trying to fill the space, but overall, I'm pretty happy with how the quilting came out! Sometimes I stop and think that if my past self that was just learning to FMQ, could see what I can do now, she'd be pretty happy that my quilting journey has progressed as well as it has. I'm not great at drawing, I've only ever been a doodler, but FMQ skills do build on each other, and by turning the rounded daisy design I've quilted several times into more flame shaped leaves (I've quilted flames several times as well), I think it made for a decent sunflower design. Could someone else have done better? Absolutely, but others may not have done as well. I don't think I'll ever feel like I am advanced as far as FMQ goes, but I'm not really a beginner either. What I am is perfectly capable of quilting my own quilts, and that was my goal all along. 

Just an FYI, the fabrics in the quilt and the backing minky are teal, a teal that is more green than blue. The photos make it look more blue than it reads in person. The sunflower fabrics have green and blue in the background, it's really a pretty even mix.