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. 

Civil War or Bust

  No, this is not a political statement of any kind, I'm talking about Civil War Era reproduction fabrics. One of my 2026 goals was to bust my Civil War era fabrics. DD#1 wants a Civil War era quilt, and I just finished cutting it out. Well, it's cut out aside from borders and setting triangles for which I need to buy yardage. I just ordered the fabric for the setting triangles, but we chose a fabric from an upcoming line for the border, so I can't order it yet. It's a sampler quilt so it will take me a while to sew all those different blocks. I did cut out all the blocks and pieced sashing and cornerstones, but each block has the pieces clipped together with a note of the name of the block, and the page number of the directions for sewing it together. 

The reason I bought Civil War prints in the first place was because I wanted to make this Trail Mix quilt. Since it's very scrappy, I only purchased fat eighths and fat quarters, and no yardage at all. Thus me having to buy some yardage for DD#1's quilt. Since the center of hers is a sampler, the fat eighths and fat quarters worked fine. The Trail Mix quilt also uses several different blocks, so again, I'll be clipping and labeling each block. The Trail Mix quilt uses pieces as small as 1.25" square, so I'm using all but the tiniest bits of these fabrics.

This is the plastic cup I use while cutting, it's about the size of a coffee cup. The scraps from these quilts are tiny, because I need such small pieces for several of blocks. 

I am just starting to cut the Trail Mix quilt, and I think I'll have plenty of fabric for it. I picked a third pattern for any fabric left after that, and most of the sizes of strips I need are the same as what I need for the Trail Mix quilt. Looking at how much fabric I have left after cutting the Civil War Sampler quilt, I think I'll have enough fabric left for a third quilt, but what size that quilt will be is a mystery! I do think three quilts will finish off the fabric, with maybe some bits for my scrap user system. I'd like to make DD#1 a few pillow shams as well, so any remaining bits may go towards that end as well. I'm hoping the leftover yardage from her setting triangles and border will be enough fabric for borders and backings on the pillow shams. If not, I'll use something from stash that looks 1800's-ish even if it's not a repro print. 

The advantage to cutting out three quilts at once, is I only have to press all the fabrics once, no having to repress when I get it out to cut another quilt. Also, this gives me leader/enders for likely the rest of the year. I'd like to have DD#1's quilt done for Christmas, but the other two have no deadlines at all, so perfect for leader/enders! 

Finish #7

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you may recognize these fabrics as those I used in two different crazy quilts. When I was finished cutting out the crazy quilt blocks, I cut the remaining fabric into 2.5" strips, and I made this concentric square quilt. 

When I started working with these fabrics, I started with some half yard-one yard pieces from a line of fabric I liked, Paisley Place by Wilmington Fabrics. I didn't buy yardage of all the prints, and I purchased multiple yards of the border print. I supplemented from my stash so the end result was likely half stash and half the line of fabric. I got three quilts from that, two crazy quilts (one of which was queen sized, one throw), plus this quilt which is twin sized. All the yardage I had from the line is gone, but I happened upon a jelly roll of that fabric on clearance, and I still have that unopened. I rarely get asked for quilts with pink in them, so I had fun working with it. It seems like most of the girls and women I know are anti-pink. One of my nieces was the focus of the first quilt though, and her favorite color is pink, plus she's a huge fan of neutrals. I was stumped untl I saw that fabric line, and then I was inspired. My niece is an adult, and up until I saw this line of fabric I was afraid a pink quilt might come off as childish. I have made other quilts with hot pink and black that weren't childish at all, but since she prefers light pink I was a bit hesitant. 

My niece has her crazy quilt, and a friend of my granddaughter claimed the second crazy quilt, this one will likely be donated unless someone claims it first. It's hanging on my wall quilt rack so I can enjoy it for a bit before it moves on. 

It's mid-April and I've got 7 quilts done so far this year, so I am on schedule to get two quilts done per month this year. I know I'll have some catch-up to do later in the year, because we do have some travel planned, but currently I'm basting the quilts I made Frankenbatting for, and they are all throw sized, so once I start quilting those they should go quickly. 

One really fun thing we did this week was absolutely not quilt related. DH and I love live theater, and he bought us tickets to see the traveling Broadway version of Back to the Future-the Musical. It was on the University of Arizona campus, and since we got there early we had fun people watching for a bit, I was really surprised by the number of dogs on campus. Anyway, the show was great, it was the first show I've seen that used projectors heavily to add scenery to the stage. Between the projectors being able to make the scenery change quickly and the rotating stage, they really did manage to make the car look like it was moving fast, even though it wasn't moving much. One of my favorite things about live theater is watching the sets and seeing how they handle moving them between scenes. The car even "flies" at the end, just like in the movie. 

 

Frankenbatting Monster

 Soooooooo many batting scraps! I just finished up with the poly batting scraps! Final total? I pieced 11 battings that are matched with quilt tops. I pieced another batting that will work for a baby quilt, except I'm think I'm out of baby quilt tops, if I come across one I'll match it up. I have some misc. smallish pieces left that will work for book sleeves. I'd like to make a sleeve for my Ipad and Kindle for travel. 

When I started both of these pop up hampers were crammed full of poly batting scraps. The scraps were all compressed and it was crazy how much was in there. Not to mention all the poly batting scraps that never made it into a hamper and were just in a pile. You can't really tell in the pic, but the pile that's in there now is all fluffy and still not half full. That includes the baby quilt batting I pieced, along with the smaller scraps I want to use in small projects. 

I don't enjoy piecing poly batting, but 11 (12 counting the baby batting I don't have matched) battings basically for free? Totally worth it. I do have a tip that yields better results when piecing batting. 

I use a blind hem foot when piecing batting. If you push the straight edges towards that center blade, and use a wide zigzag, you are golden on joining the edges. Also, if you look closely, the zig zag stitches are being formed over the little finger that extends behind the needle. That makes the zig zag stitches a bit looser, and keeps the batting from bunching up on you. Of course, you still need to make sure the presser foot doesn't get caught in the batting, which is why poly batting is a pain to piece. I've never had that happen with cotton batting.

Pieced batting lying nice and flat with no bunching.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also have the skinny strips from squaring up the batting scraps. I have a lot of them.

I usually toss these, but I'm going to make a 16x38" pillow form and use these to stuff it. I think I'm going to cut the scraps up even smaller, but if you use batting scraps for stuffing and have any tips, please let me know! 

I could tackle cotton batting next, but that is not my plan. My next job is to piece backings for all the quilt tops that are matched with batting now, and baste as I can. I'm currently quilting the last quilt I had basted, so I need to baste more quilts anyway. With almost all my basting pins available, and most of the quilts needing basting just being throw sized, I should be able to baste most if not all of them. Once I'm done piecing the backings, I'll start piecing the cotton batting, whether or not the basting is done. 

When I baste those quilts, I will have scraps of batting from the Frankenbatts. What am I going to do with those? I am going to throw them away, guilt-free. I made myself a deal a long time ago, that if I make Frankebatts to save money, then I could toss any scraps from the Frankenbatting. It's worth it to me to piece larger pieces of batting, it is not worth it to me to piece very small pieces, which is what I'll have since I was making batting the right sizes for quilt tops I had. Sure, some might end up in a pillow, but if some ends up in the trash, I'm ok with that, after all, I'll have a dozen quilts that have batting saved from the trash. 

Oh, and the fabric scraps I showed in my last post, that were from the tote of fabric given to me? It did just take two evenings to cut it into scrap user system sizes. I've got something new I'm working on in the evenings now, but I'll tell you about that later 😉