Blocks for Quillows Done!

I worked on the remaining blocks for the quillow project, and I am finished with the blocks. I also caught up on ironing, and pressed the eight quilt tops that were together, but hadn't been ironed. Five of those were quillow tops.

Warm color leftovers led to warm colored four patches. I've got a pretty good amount already, but I won't be trying to make a quilt out of these until I've got a lot more. It will likely take a couple years before I have enough to start with it. These four patches finish at 2", so it's going to take a LOT to make a quilt of any size. 

Since I am all about assembling quillow tops right now, I switched to a light gray thread, so I can use the same thread for all, and it gave me a great excuse to switch my leader/ender project. I needed to switch leader/ender projects anyway, because all the four patches I had going are sewn. 

I dug out a UFO that has been stalled for a year or so. Those corners on the Flying Geese units are silver, so light gray thread was perfect for sewing these FG into sets of five. I have all the Flying Geese made for the quilt I wanted to make, but I realized I made too many Flying Geese, since I wasn't counting sashing in the size of the quilt and I need fewer blocks than I originally thought. No worries, I figured out another quilt to make with the leftovers, and I'm just as excited about that one. I really love using those plastic clips to clip groups of ten units together. It makes it so easy to keep count of how many units I have, and I much prefer the clips to pins. I wish I had bought the clips years ago!

Whenever I'm assembling tops I try to take a look at my UFO's and see if I've got anything that's an easy assembly to add to my pile. DH had figured the layout for this quilt a few months ago, and the rows were labeled and piled neatly waiting for assembly. I decided getting this one assembled would be a nice bonus. No sashing, no borders, so it's easy to work in. I'll be in no hurry to quilt it, but having it a quilt top instead of a pile of blocks is progress. 

This was the last quillow I needed blocks for. I've got this sewn into rows now, and another quillow up on this design wall. I was wondering how an all gray top would look, but I'm pretty happy with it. 

I'm not sure if I seems like I'm just sewing all the time or not, but I've actually been out of town a lot lately. We spent five days in Prescott, AZ, then we spent another three in the Flagstaff area a week later. The only time I allow myself to buy men's shirts for quilting is while I'm on vacation, so we hit a couple thrift stores and I got 16 shirts, a pair of pajama pants, and a dress that I am cutting up to use for quilting. I got a few more shirts than that, but some have been claimed by family, which is always OK with me. I also bought some holiday fabric at a thrift store I'm passing to my sister. My best thrift store deal was 26 items for $16. 

Here's my haul of shirts, I've already cut up the pajama pants and dress. If it's 100% cotton, I'm game to use it. I LOVE plaids, and men's shirts is the easiest way to assemble a good collection of them. 

Northern Arizona is mostly pine trees, but we did get to see some pops of color here and there. I really miss having four seasons, so it was nice to get a glimpse of autumn. 

Utter Scrap Annihilation

Scraps multiply in the night, right? You'll never get rid of them, right? I'm actually starting to think I may RUN OUT of them!!!

My scrap busting projects are going so well, I have actually emptied entire drawers of scrap strips. I store my scrap user system in kitchen base cabinet pot drawers, so not small drawers, big ones! I've emptied one drawer completely, and one is mostly empty. It is blowing my mind how much fabric I've gone through. 

These are the blocks I've been working on this week. I need to make another stack of the warm color blocks at the top of the photo. After the second warm stack of blocks, I just need to make one more stack of gray blocks, and I'll have all the blocks for the Christmas quillows finished. These blocks are all made with 1.5" cut strips (1" finished). I'm trying for a good variety, so even if I have a WOF strip, I'm cutting it in half and matching each half to a different fabric. 

When I was making blocks with 2" cut strips, I didn't mind sewing the whole block before pressing, but with the skinnier strips, I find it easier to sew the strips into pairs, press the pair then sub-cut before I sew three pairs together for a block. Since I'm using up scrap strips, they aren't all the same length, and I don't always have the right amount to evenly sub-cut into 6.5" sections. Anything less than 6.5" long I've been cutting into 1.5" sections, and I've been using those to make four patches. 

These are the cool colored (plus pink) four patches I ended up with, and I sewed a small pile of warm colored four patches today, but haven't gotten them pressed yet. I'm thinking I could bust my small stash of 1.5" squares to make even more four patches, and maybe eventually I'll have enough to make a decent sized quilt using all the four patches. I'm thinking alternating white squares but I haven't decided if I want to straight set or do something on point. If I can add enough other four patches, I can ignore the color pattern of this batch and just use all of them in the same quilt. Some of the four patches have only two fabrics, others have four different fabrics. This is the end of the road for these scraps, and I'm just using what I can, however I can. 

I just dug out a bunch more warm colored strips because I greatly underestimated how many I would need. I started sewing them, but it's pretty late and I am getting too tired and sore to sew anymore. This was DH's first day back to work in two weeks, and I really sewed too long today. I do sew when he's home, but I also take a lot of breaks. 

My goal was to get all the quillow blocks finished by Friday evening, and I don't think I will make it. At this point if I just get all the warm colored blocks finished by then I'll be satisfied. 

I just remembered I completely forgot to make granola today for DH to have for breakfast, so I better get that started so it's done before I go to bed! Oops!

UFO Finish

All piecing and no quilting gets nothing finished, so I spent my hour a day quilting until I actually had a finish!

This a nice throw sized quilt, made from bonus HST's from two baby quilts I made early last year.

This was one of the baby quilts, and I made two just alike. The Flying Geese units in the baby quilt finish at 4x8, so by double sewing the sew and flip corners, I didn't even have to short the seam to get bonus HST's that finish at 3".

Between the two baby quilts and the throw I used every bit of that blue in my stash. I did make a few extra units for the throw, but most of the HST's were just bonus from the flying geese units. I know a lot of quilters don't like doing sew and flip corners, and that's fine by me. I love them, because playing with bonus HST's is one one of my favorite things to do. I feel like I got a free quilt, even though in reality I sewed just as much, it feels like less to me. 

3,4,5,6 Rails

I am making great progress on my scrapbusting projects! I've been making rail fence blocks, some with three rails, some with four, some with five, and others with six. For my quillow project, I wanted 6" finished blocks, so most of those have four rails since I was using 2" cut (1.5" finished) strips. I'm now using 1.5" cut (1" finished) strips, so now I'm making six rail blocks. 

I'm also making rail fence blocks in other sizes for other projects. The scrap user system is taking huge hits, which was exactly my aim!

My last post I showed a three rail purple/pink baby quilt on the design wall. Now I've got a five rail purple/pink baby quilt too. The blocks are different sizes, but both quilts finish at the same size. 

The three rail baby quilt is in rows now, but the five rail is actually a top already. 

This is an all purple quillow top for one of my DDIL. It's sewn into rows, and the rows are sewn into pairs. 

The largest of my pink and purple rail fence blocks ended up being turned into this. I am not counting anything as I cut up my strips, so I'm just making do with whatever I have. I had fewer pink blocks but I think my framed squares nicely make up the deficit. Even the white strips were from my strip drawers, so I am making all these quilt tops from 100% scraps. I hate "scrap quilt" patterns that use 50% more or background. What I'm doing is really using up the scraps quickly. I've already got this sewn into a quilt top too. 

When I started sewing today, these were all the quilts that I had sewn into rows. I'm sewing by thread color, busting some colored piecing thread I had, and right now I'm using purple on everything. You can see a pink quilt on the design wall in the background, but it's going to wait until I change thread colors. If you look closely, you can also see red rows on the bottom of the stack of rows over my chair. Those are going to wait too. Right now it's all about purple. 

I finished the last of these blocks this morning, and this quillow will be for DD#2. I had run out of 2" strips in purple, so now it's onto the 1.5" strips. I'm sewing this quilt into rows are leaders/enders while I sew the other quilt rows together. I've got everything labeled, and the blocks are different sizes and these use a different sized strip, so it's not too difficult to keep things straight. 

Lest you think I only had purple and pink scraps, here are the spools I've been using on this scrapbusting spree.

The third spool in, the blue one? I'm on my SECOND spool of blue! Both were about full when I started. Remember, I've already completed three blue quillow tops, and I've still got stacks of blocks I haven't worked with yet. 

I'd like to get all the purple quilts into tops this week, but I'm not sure I can do it. I am doing three quillows in mixed colors that include purple and I don't even have those blocks done yet. Those are all with the 1.5" strips so it's six rail blocks which is a bit more sewing. We'll see. I thought I'd only have two mixed quilts with purple, but I decided to make two more quillows than my original plan, so now I've got 15 to make! Fifteen quillows to make for Christmas, and it's already October??? Ambitious or crazy, one or the other I guess.