Life Is Currently Exceeding My Speed Limit

 You know those times where everything is changing so quickly that you just need everything to slow down? That was definitely the feeling I was getting this week. Some of the things going on are good. I had two of the grandkids for four days, another two I saw two days in a row though they didn't spend the night. All good there, we had an outing with four of the grandkids to Rooster Cogburn's Ostrich Ranch which was a blast, even with one of the grands finding out, yes, ostriches do bite. 

That was all fun stuff, playing games with the teens, where DH was lamely trying to say jars are mostly used for protection, so the running gag during the game of Slapzi was explaining how every item on the cards could be used for protection. Good memory making fun.

One thing that was not on the good times list, was my mom has spent the last week in the hospital. We live in a different state, so it was a lot of calling the hospital and seeing how things were going. We couldn't go out there because DH was scheduled for back surgery this morning, which coincidentally, ended up when my mom was having a heart valve replaced. In fact, I had to excuse myself from the room where we were getting the info on DH's procedure, to take a phone call from the hospital my mom was at. They were both in surgery at exactly the same time, though DH's surgery was much shorter, and his was outpatient, so I've got a bag full of dressing supplies and a recovering husband here at home. My mom came through her heart valve surgery like a champ, and she is doing well too, though in the hospital for at least one more day. Although all of that was stressful, the good outcomes put those in the good column after all. 

I had planned to spend March piecing batting scraps together, and that is still the plan, though I haven't started yet. I had a few more quilt tops I wanted to sew together from my February "Let's get these quilt blocks into quilt tops" push. 

I did get the remaining quilt blocks/misc. units into one tote! Considering I started February with almost three times this much, that's a win. I put the tote under the stairs, and don't really have plans to pull it out again until fall/winter, when my goal will be to get the blocks into a smaller tote. I'll always have leftover blocks/units, so I know I'll never have it down to nothing, but since I'm down to one tote, I'd like to keep it that way. If I can sew up the next  blocks I make as I go, there's hope I can keep the extra blocks to one tote. I will dig the tote out of I need a backing just a bit wider, because a line of orphan blocks is a good way to make that happen. Some of these blocks are orphan blocks, some are enough to make a quilt from, but didn't make the cut this time. 

I finished sewing the last of the quilt blocks from the February push into rows while DH was napping. I have four quilt worth of rows sewn, none of which will be getting borders, and I have one quilt center that needs borders. I'll work on getting all of that pressed later today, so I can work on finishing those quilt tops up over the weekend. I have a quilt top laid out for basting this weekend too, but I did get a quilt basted while I had the grandkids. 

I also have a finish!

I sewed this Spring Twist quilt top in a hotel room in Arkansas. The pastel strips were given to me from an acquaintance, the green accent was leftover quilt wide back, and the border fabric was from my mom's stash. That border fabric is OLD. I know my mom made DD#1 something from it back in 1980's. I really think this was a good project for it to shine. 

I went to start quilting another quilt, and I had a part on my Janome break, so it is now in the shop. When it works, that machine is amazing, but I am a really prolific quilter, and I think maybe it's not the right machine for me. I'm also not a fan of the Janome dealer, they said six weeks for the repair, but I've had them take over three months before. Time to weigh my options and consider a change. I have two Bernina 440's and they quilt beautifully, I just prefer a larger harp when quilting. I could just concentrate on quilting some smaller quilts for a bit, or I could get a different machine, time will tell. I am so blessed to have more than one sewing machine, so even a broken part doesn't completely derail my plans. 

Finish #4

 The fourth quilt of 2026 is done! It's queen sized, and since I don't have an immediate recipient for this one it's hanging on the huge quilt rack in my living room. I've made several quilts from this line of fabric, but this is the end of the line. I may have random bits left in the scrap system, but overall, this line of fabric is out of my stash. 

You can see the quilting better on the back. I used a lavender thread, because I didn't want a dark color on all the white on the front, but it shows up a lot on the back. 

I've got the grandkids this weekend, which will be great! It won't allow much time for quilting, which is fine. I've been really productive this month, taking the time in January to clean up my quilting areas made a big difference. 

For March I really want to dive into the batting scraps, but I need to assemble a couple more quilt tops before my remaining quilt blocks will fit into just one tote. Considering I had quilt blocks everywhere, getting them into one tote is a huge win. I haven't kept count of how many quilt tops I've made in the last month or so, but it's a LOT! I don't like assembling quilt tops in the summer, but I've got a plan for most of the quilt blocks in the tote and when I dig it out again in the fall or winter, I'm hoping to be able to get the blocks into a smaller tote. There are a lot of random units in the tote as well, besides quilt blocks. I have a growing pile of orphan blocks in there too. I may go into the tote if I need a bit of extra width or length for a quilt backing. Making a row or column of orphan blocks can be a fun way to make a backing a little larger. I'm almost out of basted quilts, so a basting spree is on my mind, but I want to piece some batting first, so I use the Frankenbattings during the basting spree instead of storing them. I feel like I'm cleaning up the quilting area the really slow way. Sure, it looks tidier now, but It's not until I have a bit more breathing room that I'll feel like it's really working. 

Slow Going

Things are progressing around here, albeit slowly. I haven't done any FMQ in a week. We've had more going on lately than I was thinking we'd have, and I get off track when I can't keep to a schedule.

I'm still assembling quilt tops from blocks that were already made. I found SO many quilt blocks in the January declutter, that I don't want to stop assembling quilts until I can get all the remaining quilt blocks into ONE tote. I'm not down to one tote yet, so I keep making quilt tops. Most of these quilt tops will be donation quilts, and I'll likely do simple quilting on them to get them done. 

I had set aside the first quarter of the year to work on whatever I wanted to work on. I did the decluttering and cleanup in January, and I thought I'd be working on Frankenbatting in February, but I think that's going to wait until March. I've got several more quilt tops ready for assembly, and I'll spend the rest of February working on that. 

One thing that's been going amazingly well, is my dealing with my scraps. I've been cutting scraps almost every evening, and since I had so many scraps from quilt backings, It's really been well timed  to use scraps in the quilt tops I'm currently making. When scraps are 108" long, even narrower strips go a long ways. 

I used leftover backing fabric for the sashing on a couple more Dancing Nine Patch quilts. 

I've been making a bunch of hourglass blocks to alternate with scrappy nine patches. I love hourglass blocks as alternating blocks because it makes the quilt look on point when it's only straight set. The number of hourglass blocks I get from my scraps determines the size of the quilt. If I have quite a bit of one fabric all in odd sized pieces I don't want to stash, I cut them into either sashing or blocks, then I use what I cut the evening before as my leader/enders while I'm assembling a quilt. By the time I'm done assembling the first quilt, I often have the alternate blocks sewn up for the next quilt. By using backing scraps four my hourglass blocks or sashing, I'm making quilts from 100% scraps, since the blocks I'm setting are scrappy too. 

Some of the sewing I'm doing is also using up cut pieces I found while cleaning up. They may be pieces leftover from a finished project, or cut for a project I never made.

I had a stack of 2.5x6.5 cut pieces with white and cream backgrounds. I had some narrow backing scraps in blue that I could cut into 2.5" strips, and this quilt top was born. 

I've still got way too many 6" scrappy blocks to set, but I wanted a break from working with that size.

I put two quilts on my design wall, one with 12" blocks, one with 8" blocks.

I don't mind these blocks set right next to each other, but I only have 18 blocks. I could set it 4x4 and have two blocks left over, but I don't want leftovers, I want to bust these blocks. I went to the scrap basket, and cut out two more blocks. I hope to get those blocks sewn up tomorrow. 

On the other side of my design wall, I put up some 8" blocks. I have 35 blocks, so I can set it 5x7 with no blocks left. I don't like these set right next to each other, and I don't have enough of any more scraps to use scraps for the sashing. I grabbed a slate blue from stash, and I'll cut both sashing and borders from it. There's enough different prints in there already, that I think just a plain sashing and border will calm it down a bit.

Lately when I make scrap quilts I've been more intentional with my color choices, and I make a lot of two color scrap quilts or stick with a more cohesive esthetic. Most of these blocks are left from my kitchen sink days, and I still love those everything goes quilts. In fact, I've started a new
kitchen sink scrap quilt since my 3.5" squares overflowed their allotted space. I'm making a big checkerboard quilt, alternating dark and light but using all the colors. I'll run out of light colored squares first, but by then I'll be able to fit the 3.5" squares left into their correct bin.

Since I'm mostly working with finished blocks, I'm not having to sew that much to get quilt tops done. I've had more Nana time than sewing time lately. I had grandkids for the weekend, and I'm watching a couple of the grands tonight too. Tomorrow will be a day trip with the grands. The weather has been fantastic lately, and around here, you try to do as many outdoor things as you can before it gets too hot. It's been a very warm February so far, which doesn't bode well for summer. I don't like assembling quilts in summer, but don't mind FMQ in summer. I've got so many quilt tops made I'll be good for a couple summers at least! 

My scrap basket is just over half full, when it was overflowing stacked twice as high as the basket. Basically, I've processed about 70% of what I started with. I've gone through what's still in the basket, and I found leftover masks cut out in 2020. If anything, I found that encouraging, because it let me know I do actually process my scraps, I'd have had a lot more scraps than that over the last six years than this. I think the basket mostly fills up when I have to make the fabric room look presentable in a hurry, like if we are hosting a big event, or we are getting ready to leave town and I don't want to come home to a mess. That's when the scraps get tossed on the basket instead of dealt with. I'm hoping to have the basket empty by the end of March at the latest, but I might be able to do it before then. Most of what's left needs to be pressed before I can cut it, where the stuff on top was less wrinkled. I'm making good progress anyway, and the end is in sight, even if I can't finish this month. 

Scrap Square Rail Fence

As I was going through my sewing room, I found so many things I had cut with the best of intentions, but somehow got set aside. Most of it, I knew exactly what I had planned, but some of those, I no longer wanted to go along with my original plan. Some of those I using in other projects that I am more excited to do.

I had a stack of 3.5x15.5" cut gray rectangles. I knew I had cut them for a hashtag quilt, but I've already got at least two hashtag quilts going, where the blocks are done but I need to assemble the quilt top. I could have cut those rectangles down into other sizes, but I looked around for scraps I already cut that could work with them. I had a big box of 3.5" cut squares. Five of those sewn together would be the same length. I started playing around with EQ8.

I could make columns of just alternating strips and blocks, and flip every other column over. This quilt would be 50% scraps, 50% background. 

I could make rail fence blocks with 5 rails, every other rail being blocks. If I make rails 1,3, and 5 from my scrap squares for every block, I end up with this.

With all the rail blocks made the same way, the quilt is 60% scrap squares, and 40% background.

Would it look better if I made half the blocks with rails 1,3 and 5 scrappy, and the other half the blocks rails 2 and 4 scrappy? It would be 50% scraps, 50% background.

All of them were valid options, but I liked the idea of busting more scrappy squares, so I chose option 2.

Here is just one block...

...and here's a quilt set 4x5 on the design wall. With those big 15" blocks, a 20 block quilt will be 60x75 without borders. When DH saw the quilt on my design wall, he said, "It looks like a maze quilt, but it isn't." I agreed, and told him it was much easier to sew than a maze quilt. The designs it makes to me looks like vertical and horizonal belt buckles. 

I'm sure I'm not the first to make this block, but I did not get it from a pattern, it was just what I came up with to use the rectangles I had cut, with the scrap squares I had cut. I have a lot of squares in my scrap user system that I could make this block with. If you use squares cut from 2.5" jelly roll strips, the finished block size would be 10" Use 2" cut squares, and your finished block size would be 7.5", 1.5" cut squares, and you'd have 5" finished blocks. My preference when busting scraps is to have less than 50% background, so making every block the same and only having 40% background fits that goal better. 

I'm going to end up with 2 quilts from these blocks, plus a couple orphan blocks that will likely make their way into a quilt backing. That's fine with me, I busted those strips without going into any yardage at all. I always try to use scraps first, otherwise they never go down!

Good Start to the Year

 January has been a good start to my personal goals for the year. I've pretty much decluttered all the areas I wanted to declutter. I've always got a donation box going, so I'll toss things in there as I come across things I can pass on, but my major declutter is done. I was writing on the calendar how many things I got rid of each day, and my January total is 529 Items donated, 4 trash bags full and 2 boxes of things I didn't count individually. I really wanted to get to 500 items, and I passed that so it's a win! 

This was a no-buy month for me, and I did well on that too. Every time I thought of something I wanted, I put it on a list, and by the end of of the month, aside from a couple of grocery items, I only had one thing left on my list. What happened to the other things? I found stuff during my declutter that could be repurposed and made buying unnecessary. 

Here's a good example of that. I've been wanting a basket to store my onions in, to keep them away from the potatoes. My potatoes were sprouting too quickly near the onions. When I was decluttering the sewing room, I came across this basket which works fine for the onions.

I usually have far more onions in the house, the basket was full when I moved it to the kitchen. Onions are on my grocery list 😉

The one thing that stayed on my list, I broke no-buy for and picked it up at the thrift store I was dropping stuff off at. 

The plastic basket I used to keep my quilting tools in in my living room craft corner broke, and I needed something to put my tools and a couple small rulers into. The basket was probably 20 years old, so it wasn't really a surprise it broke. I had found something on Amazon that would work for just under $20, I wanted something that looked a little nicer than what I had. I looked around the thrift store for something that would work, and I found this.

Yes, I broke no-buy for it, but it was $8 instead of $20. The only other time I broke no-buy this month was when I suggested DH and I get to-go coffee on a daytrip to his sister's house. I, of course, paid all the bills, and took my turns paying for lunch when my sister and I go out each week, but that was a given. 

I reverse meal planned all month, starting my meal planning with stuff I already had. I managed to skip grocery shopping all together one week, and had two weeks of only spending $60, which with today's grocery prices I thought was great. I'm going to continue the pantry/freezer cleanout into February. DH won't complain a bit about that, he's been eating well, homemade pot pie, homemade soups (we love soup), Korean BBQ fried rice, gumbo, chili, spaghetti, etc...

In the evenings I've been tackling the backlog of fabric scraps. Since I just found all the quilt blocks I have made, I'm cutting whatever I need from the scraps to get those blocks into quilts.

I like the Dancing Nine Patch setting, so I've cut the scraps of several widebacks into the sashing for these quilts. I've also been cutting a lot of larger scraps into hourglass blocks for alternate blocks to go with the blocks I've already got. I'm sewing up the alternate blocks and sewing the sashings on the day after I cut them. I haven't been taking photos much, But I have assembled a lot of quilt tops this month, and my piles of quilt blocks are going down. Smaller scraps I'm cutting for the scrap user system. 

 I've cut some borders out of the scraps for quilts that need them. I found a group of scraps that work really well together, so I am going to cut one new quilt from those, but I will add some other scraps from my scrap user system to the new scraps, and the pattern I'm going to use need no background or borders, so it's a great scrap buster. 

I still have a lot more scraps to process.

This is the basket I keep for scraps at my cutting table, and yes, it's still full, a bit over-filled in fact. When I started processing scraps I could have filled this basket three times with all the scraps that were tossed all over the fabric room. I've got to have another basting spree, so I'm going to be making more scraps from making backings. I'm hoping to have an empty scrap basket by the end of March. Yes, it will fill up again, but if I can empty it, it won't be so overwhelming, and I am much better about using scraps when they are pre-cut. 

My other January goal was exercise, and I exercised 4-5 times per week which was my goal. 

So what's up for February? Now that my fabric room is cleaned up, I'm going to trash it by going through all the batting scraps and piecing Frankenbatting. I haven't tackled batting scraps in a couple years, so it's a huge undertaking. I'm going to be basting quilts too, so I'm not even sure I'll finish that in February. I'm almost done quilting another quilt, so most of my basting pins are free. I need to get another pile of quilts basted, and if I can use Frankenbatting for a bunch of those, it will help clear out space in my quilt closet. Piecing batting is not my favorite thing to do, but saving money on batting is something I do like, so it's worth it. It's also not that hard to do, I just procrastinate on doing it too long so I have a ridiculous amount of batting scraps to deal with. I don't mind piecing Warm and Natural, so I have pieced quite a bit of that for table runners and such, but the poly batting? Not much fun piecing that. I've debating switching to only using Warm and Natural batting, but with the number of quilts I tend to make, I can't afford to do that. Someday, if I find myself quilting less, I likely will make the switch. 

Since we didn't have any travel planned for the first quarter of the year, I really wanted to tackle the stuff I've been putting off, and set myself up for a successful year. If I can do as well in February, as I did in January, it will be great!