January a Bust? I Think Not

I must admit, January has not had as much sewing in it as I would have liked. It also hasn't as much cutting in it as I'd have liked. I can't say it's a bust though, because January has had some great family time in it, and that's a win!

I had a great time last weekend with four grandkids in the house. The little ones did much better than I expected, though Saturday night I got to stay up with the baby. Boy, nothing makes you feel older like staying up with a fussy baby. I'm glad I had my babies young!

I did get a bit done this week.

I pulled fabrics and started cutting for the next grandbaby quilt. The baby is coming in March, I need to get going on this one!

The nine blocks I had done last week have turned into forty blocks now.

I took the time to sort out more blocks and have each block worth of pieces clipped together. I can use these as leaders/enders more easily if I'm not having to chose combinations. 

The red, white, and blue quilt that was on the design wall in my last post is now in rows. I also finished assembling the center of Visual Frustration. 

This UFO has been on my Tin Lizzie table for too long now, so I'm trying to get back in the habit of FMQ for one hour per day. I should easily finish quilting this tomorrow. This quilt was made from leftovers from a wedding quilt, made six years ago! It's time to get it finished, it's been lying around long enough!

Not a ton to show for my week, but progress is progress, and I'll take it!

Nana Mode

This week has mostly been a bust for quilting, and this weekend I'm positive NO sewing time will happen. I've mostly been in Nana mode. While DD#3's family has been moving in, I've been watching the grandtwins. This coming weekend I'll also have DD#2's kiddos, so yeah, definite Nana mode, not quilting mode. 

To top off all of that, even during the week while the grandtwins were in school, I caught a nasty virus and was pretty much just sleeping or resting. I'm still not 100%, but much better than a couple days ago, so I think I can handle the craziness of this coming weekend, but I'll likely need a couple days next week to recover. I'm not used to getting up with a baby anymore, so this weekend should be an adventure. 

I did get three hours or so total in the quilting studio this week. 

I got a quilt laid out on the design wall. I've found that's a good way to make me feel like I got something done when I don't have much time. The blocks were finished quite a while ago, but just putting them on the design wall makes it feel like I got something productive done. 

Since I had so little time in the quilting studio, I decided to just sew up some things already cut and waiting to assemble. Nine blocks are not much, but it's nine more than were finished last week.

I didn't take the time to cut out anything, which I REALLY need to do. I need to make three baby girl quilts, none of which are cut out. I need to work on the wedding quilt, which isn't cut out. I need to make three more weighted blanket tops which aren't cut out, and I have two quilt kits I want cut and moved into the queue. Add to that I have several quilts that need sashing cut before I can assemble them, and yeah, I could spend two or three weeks just cutting right now. Oh, burp rags, bowl cozies, scrub tops and pajama pants all need to be cut out as well! Once all of those things are cut out, and I get a couple deadline quilts finished, I'll be onto cutting up my sister's clothes for memory quilts, so cutting is actually my biggest obstacle right now. 

I don't know about you, but I normally iron and starch all my fabrics before cutting, I find starch makes my cuts more accurate, whether I'm using a rotary cutter or my Accuquilt Studio. It makes cutting take longer, because I have to have the time to press and cut. It makes my results so much better, that it's worth the extra time, I just haven't had a lot of available time lately. 

I've been making strips of seven 2x3.5" pieces as my main leader/ender project for a while now. I'm just starting on the yellow and oranges now, since I just recently finished cutting those colors. I've already got 170 strip sets done, and it takes two of these to make a block. I need to cut three strips of background for each block as well, again with needing something cut! I had no idea how many strips I was going to end up with, and I still haven't counted how many yellow and orange stripsets I'll have. I could add in browns and blacks too, since I am using white as the background color, but I haven't decided. I suppose it depends on if I decide to make one queen sized quilt, or two twins. This one doesn't have a destination yet, so I am undecided. I would like to at least get it to block stage before I set it aside though. 

Since I haven't had a lot of time sewing, I have been doing a lot of thinking about what kind of quilts I want to make. I always have a lot of deadline quilts, that's what happens when you have a very large family and everyone expects a quilt for big occasions. I haven't done much donating of quilts in the last couple of years, and I'd like to get back to that. Kids quilts are easy and fun, and goodness knows I have plenty of kids fabrics in stash. I've donated several quilts to Project Linus over the years. I've also donated to the Veteran's hospital DH works at. 

The thing is, I've really had another place on my mind lately, and I need to contact them, which I haven't done. I've really been thinking about kids who age out of foster care, and how they are pretty much stuck with few options and not a lot of help. As my kids moved out I gave them extra kitchen stuff, extra towels, let them take all their bedroom furniture, stuff like that. I even went through my pantry and got them a start on building up basic foodstuffs. I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to be just 18, with no support system, and nothing to start with. I've heard of a couple organizations that accept used household goods to help those kids, but I think I'd really like to donate new quilts to an organization like that. I don't mind making larger quilts, so if full or queen sized quilts are most helpful I'm ok with that. Does anyone have any experience working with one of these type of charities? If so, I'd love to hear from you! 

Revolving Doors

DH and I joke around that we should have put revolving doors on our house. We seem to have people in and out on a regular basis. Sometimes it's just out of town company, sometimes it's people needing a place to stay for a while. 

This week we'll have both of those. DD#2 and family will be here Friday night to stay just one night, then on Saturday, DD#3's family will be temporarily moving in. I've spent more time moving things around this week than quilting, but I think we are ready! I had to completely reorganize our small storage room so I could get some totes out from under the stairs which is where their dog crate will go. I also put up one of the basting tables in my fabric room, and have totes stored under that table.

I always have people comment on how organized my stuff is, so this photo should make you feel better, I make big messes too! The totes that have stuff I want to work on very soon are under this table, some totes I won't be using are now in the storage room instead of under the stairs where they were. Three of these totes are filled with my second sister's clothes, and I really want to get her clothes cut soon for memory quilts. 

On top of the table there are so many things! The weighted blanket top I assembled this week is on there, a mountain of flannel for burp rags I want to cut is next to that. I have a bolt of Wrap and Zap batting with my bowl cozy die on top, and the panel I made to cut up for borders for the Visual Frustration quilt is at the end. One of these totes could probably be emptied pretty easily, I've emptied several totes over the past month. 

I finished cutting another quilt for my scrap busting spree. I am going to make a yellow and orange quilt with blocks made of concentric squares. I'm really looking forward to that!

The leftover squares I have of Civil War reproduction fabric has been turned into four patches. I ended up with 220 four patches, but since they'll only finish at 3" that's not saying much. I want to use hourglass blocks as alternating squares, but I haven't decided which colors to use for my hourglass blocks, so for now these are just set aside, with a note of how many blocks I have and what I plan on doing with them. 

Besides finishing the top of the weighted blanket, I got the purple and white quilt and the red and white quilt from the last post assembled and hung in the closet. No hurry for either of those to be done. My scrap-busting projects are mostly my leader/enders these days, so making the four patches was a fun change. I need to get a couple deadline quilts cut out so those can be my main projects, and I still have quilt blocks ready to go on the design walls which are currently empty. I don't have time to do everything, but I'm moving things along, so it's a win!

Cleaning Up the Hard Way

I'm still working on reorganizing my quilting areas, more so now since we'll have a family moving in with us for a month or two. I have projects I SHOULD be working on, but sometimes I get waylaid by a project screaming at me to work on it. I had four big blocks leftover from a Strip Twist I finished last year, and that wasn't enough to even make a baby quilt. When I came across the blocks, they called out to me, wanting to made into a quilt top. I didn't have a lot of purples or WOW fabrics left in my 2.5" strip drawers, but I grabbed what I had and pieced more stripsets for more blocks. When I finished with those, I realized I only needed two more quarter blocks to make a 3x4 setting, and with 15" blocks, that's a 45x60" kiddie quilt. I had some 3.5 strips I could cut down into 2.5" strips, made the extra two blocks, and this is what I ended up with...

I've already sewn this into a top, pressed it and it's hanging in the closet. Some purple binding will finish it off well enough, and I won't add borders. 

One of the weighted blankets I had made for a granddaughter met a tragic end, so I guess I'm not out of the weighted blanket business yet after all. I had a request for one for a grandson too. I haven't tackled the boy one yet, but I went though my scraps of fleece and got one up on the design wall for my granddaughter.

I've already sew this into rows, and hope to have the top finished shortly. 

I have blocks for several quilts lying around my sewing room, and I need to get those off my flat surfaces, so I can work on the projects I need to be working on. Most of those are from my scrapbusting projects, which I am still cutting for. I need to knock my Scrap User System down, because it's overflowing it's designating storage, so time to make a bunch of scrap quilt and clear those drawers out!

I got this baby quilt up on a design wall too, and I'm almost finished sewing the rows of this. I find it easy to work on multiple quilts at once, I know some people don't work that way, but it works for me. 

I've also been assembling the top of Visual Frustration. If you don't remember the quilt it's this one.

DH laid this one out, and he kept starting patterns but not finishing them, and he named it Visual Frustration. I hadn't worked on it for a while because the quillow project took over. Now that I've almost got the top together (four more seams to go!) I've decided I think its too long for the width. I had DH set it to use as many HST's as possible, which were leftover from another project. I hadn't planned on adding border, but now I want to, and to add to the Visual Frustration, each side will be different. I had some 1.5" strips left over from these fabrics, and by adding some black fabric for the bulk of the borders, I think I've got a fun idea on what to do with those borders. Again, not a project I need to be working on, but one that I'm excited to work on. Once it's a top, I'll be happy to set it aside, but I've learned if I'm really excited to work on something, it's best to go ahead and do it, at least to quilt top stage.

Sewing stuff up into quilt tops is a SLOW way of cleaning, but it's sometimes the way I work. I can let a quilt top hang in the closet for years and not have it weigh on my mind, but before it's a quilt top, it's causing stress. Those quilt tops in the closet have saved me multiple times, when I need a fast quilt. If one of those quilt tops fit the need, it's a quick finish to just baste and quilt a top, rather than starting from scratch. 

I am thinking about my deadline quilts too. I chose a pattern for the wedding quilt I need to make, and after hearing their color choices, I decided to do a gradient. They asked for black, white, and silver, and the pattern I was thinking of looks great as a gradient. I thought I was going to have buy fabric to do a decent gradient, but I think I came up with an acceptable one from stash. I had one different fabric I wanted to use in the middle, but I didn't have enough of it once I did all the math and figured yardage requirements. I think this will work though.

What do you think? Will that work? 

I'm working on so many things my mind is racing at night, filled with quilty ideas. I'm making progress though, so overall, I'm pretty happy with things.