Trio of Tops

 I've been beyond busy this week. I got three quilt tops sewn together. 

This quilt top from bargello leftovers finally got it's borders. I suppose I could add another border all the way around, but I'm not going to, I like the size it is now. I also don't have anything in stash that would work as a border for this, and I'm not buying anything for that. 

The last wedding quilt of 2021 is now a top. I didn't spread it flat for a photo, it's just draped over my cutting table, but you get the idea. This pattern is Film At Five, which I've made two other times scrappy as shown in the tutorial, but this time I subbed big novelty prints for the 25 patches. 

The last quilt top is the trippy looking Cascade quilt I showed a couple posts ago. I didn't take a new photo.

Yesterday I was sewing like mad, and got five quilts sewn into rows. None of these quilts will be getting borders. One good thing about sewing so many quilts into rows is I don't have time to overthink the layouts, which can be a sticking point for me. 

The first quilt sewn into rows was a girly throw I had on the design wall a while back. 

^This is the boys version of the same quilt, but this one is one row larger each dimension. It's in rows too.

^The rail fence blocks I made from scraps a while back and then cut up are now in rows for three quilt tops. This was my first one. I alternated X's and O's.

^For my second I opted for a herringbone setting. 

^The third I just kept all the HST's in the same direction. 

I've pressed all the rows for all five quilt tops, but I won't get another chance to sew until next week. I've got grandkids the rest of this week, then company this weekend. 

I finalized my plan for the Star Wars quilt I need to make. I need 24 different fabrics, because the quilt will be 48 blocks and I didn't want more than two blocks with each fabric. I can actually get enough from each fat quarter for four blocks, so I'll just make two quilts at once. I only need one right now, but I know an extra Star Wars quilt won't sit around long. I tried to only buy fat quarters, but there were a couple fabrics I found that I had to get 1/2 yards, and one or two I had to get full yards. Some of the Star Wars fabric will go into stash, but not much, I'll be using as much as I can right away. I ordered all of those fabrics online, so now I'm waiting for them to arrive. Hopefully they'll get here in a timely manner, so I can get started on that quilt, but I've got plenty to keep me busy in the meantime. 

Shopping Instead of Sewing

 I knew the next month or so was going to be iffy on the sewing front. I haven't gotten much sewing done, but I did do a bit.

I finished piecing the sashing for the last wedding quilt of 2021. It's all directional, so I had to keep track of vertical sashings vs. horizontal sashings.

This morning I put it up on the design wall. You can't see all of it, it's five rows down, and the last row of sashing is actually lying flat on the floor. It's a superhero themed quilt, but I threw in a few Easter egg fabrics in the small squares. I slipped in some video game fabric, some Star Wars, Star Trek, and even a bit of Harry Potter. All the big squares are superheroes, and for the most part, they are alternating diagonal lines of Marvel and DC. The corners got a little weird, and one square is the Incredibles which is Disney, so... I did what made sense to me when I was laying it out, and I'm not sure the recipient will ever notice the pattern. 

I've got the first block finished for the leader/ender quilt project I've got going while I'm working with black. I also sewed up a bunch of black HST's for a table runner. 

I spent a lot of my week Christmas shopping. If you think it's early I'm telling you this year it isn't. I ordered a spring horse my two grandkids in Kansas, and it looks like I ordered the last one available, and it won't arrive until late October. I ordered them both cowboy hats to go with it, and one of those won't arrive until late November! If I had waited much longer, that wouldn't have worked at all. For all the other grandkids I went with books. I'm buying used books when I can, because I think it's better for the planet, not to mention it saves me money. DH and I went to so many thrift shops over the last week, and I got what I could there, then filled in the holes in book series on ebay and Amazon. Some of the books I was hunting are out of print, so used was my only option anyway. I'm now finished shopping for the grandkids, and I just have the adults to do. I'm going to go with gift cards and food for them, so I can wait on that. 

I did a bit of fabric shopping as well, but very targeted shopping. The kid quilt I need before Christmas now has a theme, they chose Star Wars, and I'm out of Star Wars fabric. I ordered a panel, and some fat quarters. I don't have a plan for that yet, but when the fabric arrives, I'll see what I can come up with. If I need to buy more fabric I will, I didn't buy any yardage and I'm probably going to want a border on that quilt. We'll see, if I do something modern I might be able to do without a border. 

Looking forward to 2022, I realized I need to make a big girl bed quilt for my youngest granddaughter. I make all the grandkids a twin sized quilt for their second birthday. Her birthday is in March, so getting an idea of what I'm doing now would be helpful. I talked to DS the Younger, and he said Miss X loves big brother's I Spy quilt, so they wanted one of those for her as well. I ordered a couple fat quarters with that quilt in mind too. I have lots of I Spy squares already cut, but the variety isn't what I'd like it to be. The only vegetable squares I have left are carrots, and I want to make sure I have some squares in hers that brother doesn't have. I may look for a few more novelty fabrics with that quilt in mind, but I'm trying to buy the smallest amount of fabric that's practical. I always use 6.5" cut squares in my I Spy quilts, so most of the I Spy assortments I see available on Etsy or ebay aren't large enough. I did order a novelty scrap bag, and we'll see what I can get out of that.

In case you are wondering where I buy so many novelty fat quarters, I shop here. I've ordered from this shop several times and always get great service. A lot of shops that advertise fat quarters either sell mostly bundles, or don't have a lot of novelty fabrics. I love this shop because I can pick and choose individual novelty fat quarters, and not waste my money on a bundle that has a lot of prints I don't need. I've made so many themed quilts, that buying novelty fat quarters is a perfect way to get a variety of fabrics without adding a bunch of yardage to the stash. Fat quarters also give me more options than 1/4 yard cuts. For I Spy quilts I always use 6.5" squares, but for themed quilts I might do something completely different. The superhero quilt above uses both 10.5" squares and 2.5" squares. You can't get a 10.5" square out of a traditional 1/4 yard cut, but you can usually get two from a fat quarter. 

Today I'm planning to start assembling the superhero quilt. I also need to get my hour of FMQ in, something I've not been consistent about this week. DH doesn't know it yet, but he's taking me out to dinner tonight ;-) That way I'll have extra sewing time while he works on his magazine!

Design Wall Full? Welcome to the Design Floor!

I finished assembling the three brown/burgundy quilt tops I was working on last week. Now I've got a different quilt on the design wall.

It's nice and cheery and I haven't been in too much of a hurry to take it down and assemble it.

The problem came in when I was just randomly assembling columns for another quilt, but I need to lay the columns out to try to prevent too many of the same fabrics being grouped together. Thus, the design floor.

I do have one spot where the same fabric touches diagonally (besides the navy background). I've decided it's just going to stay that way, because every time I tried rearranging the columns I ended up with something touching. This quilt looks pretty trippy, and I made it with a teen in mind. The pattern is called Cascade and the tutorial is here. My plan is to press the columns tonight, and then sew the last four seams tomorrow. Since I was using scraps and not jelly rolls, my quilt is not the same dimensions as the tutorial. I also decided against borders, and the pattern calls for borders. I think it's pretty funny, I have the binding tool you use to make this quilt in two sizes, but I've never used it for binding. There are several quilt patterns that use the binding tool as a template, and I wanted to make a couple of those, so that's why I bought them. I'd totally make this quilt again! It's fast and easy, and has a fun modern vibe. I think you could have a lot of fun doing a rainbow quilt with this pattern, and plan the cascade drops across the quilt. 

The bridal shower I went to on Saturday was lovely. The bride liked the quilt, and gave me a huge hug! The wedding is in about ten days, and I'm looking forward to it. Neither the shower nor the wedding are large affairs. 

This coming weekend I'm having DD#1's family over for Miss A's birthday. She's turning 7, and one of the things I'm giving her is a cross necklace I got when I was seven. I came across it when I was decluttering in June, and decided she's the granddaughter who should get that. It's a very nice quality necklace, which is the only reason I've kept a child's necklace all these years. I never even considered giving it to one of my three daughters, but giving it to Miss A seems right. Sometimes you just know it's time to pass something on when the right person comes along. 

Besides the Cascade Quilt, I sewed up the blocks for three other quilts this week. They were all scrap projects that were already started, I'm not starting any new projects until I clear up some of my current projects. I also finished the weighted blanket I really didn't want to make. I've been using nine patches as my leader/project for quite a while now, and I am really sick of nine patches! I've still got quite a few nine patches to go, so hopefully by the time I've got the latest batch of quilts assembled, I'll be finished with the nine patches. I have so many quilts ready to assemble it's crazy! Of course, once I get all those scrappy nine patches finished, that will be several more quilt tops, but I'll have to decided how to set them, and that may take a while. 

I finally started sewing the last of the 2021 wedding quilts. It's been cut for a while now, and it's finally made it to the front of the piecing queue! Well, I say front of the queue, but actually, I was using it as leaders/enders while I pieced the side borders for the bargello quilt. I'd like to get that bargello quilt top finished in the next week or so. 

DH has next week off work, so I don't know how much sewing time I'll have. There's actually a lot going on over the next month or so, so I'm going to have to be really flexible. DH has two different weeks off in the next month, not consecutively. I have a birthday party and a wedding happening, plus I will have two different pairs of grandkids spending multiple nights here at different times. Lots of interruptions, but good ones, so it's all fine. 

 My sewing goals for the next month are to assemble quilt tops as I have time, piece the wedding quilt and finish planning the baby and kid quilt that now have a before Christmas deadline. I hope to make steady progress doing my FMQ an hour per day, and for non-quilty stuff my focus will be cutting and sewing up scrub tops for DH. How much I'll get done it anyone's guess, but if I don't make a plan and have it prioritized, nothing will get done. I'd rather have a plan and not meet my goals because life got busy, than have the time and not get things done because I didn't know where to start. 

I'm sure some people are great at winging it, but I'm a "fail to plan is a plan to fail" kind of girl. I like lists, they keep me focused, even if that list has me working on several things at once. 

A Big Finish

 

The second of three wedding quilts for this year is finished! Just in the nick of time too, since the bridal shower is Saturday! I picked the fabrics for this quilt last year, but I didn't start cutting until this year, so it's a new start for the year. I'm perfectly OK with new starts, but finishing it the same year I started it is a big win. This quilt is a monster, 110" x 110".

I started quilting another quilt this morning, the advantage of basting several quilts at a time, I can easily do my hour of FMQ on the next quilt right after a finish. I'm using the same quilting design on this quilt as I did on that wedding quilt. 

I got half the weighted blanket filled. I had time to finish it, but I decided to spend the time folding as much fabric as I could onto my mini-bolt boards. I ran out of boards before I was done, but most of that big fabric purchase is on boards and put away. I cleared a shelf for the remaining fabric, so my cutting table is cleared off! As I empty mini-bolts, I'll get the remaining fabric onto boards and put it where it actually belongs, but for now this is workable.

I had a couple people ask me who was pregnant when I was making all the burp rags that got finished last week. At the time, I didn't know of anyone being pregnant. Well...that didn't last long. Come to find out, one of my nieces is pregnant and had been keeping it hush hush. I didn't find out until she announced it is a boy! I talked to her and she wants a Marvel themed quilt for the baby, which is easy, I should have everything to make that. She also wants me to make a quilt for her stepson, which I'm happy to do, but she wasn't sure what theme she wanted for his quilt. All that is great, then I found out she's due on Christmas Eve, which doesn't give me much time, when I still have a wedding quilt to finish this year too! I'm going to have to follow up pretty quickly on the stepson's quilt, because I need to get it planned out so it can get cut and put into the queue.

I'm still trying to clear the decks of quilts that need assembly too. These blocks were from busting my brown 2" strips, and I ended up with enough blocks to make two throw quilts like this, plus one baby quilt. I have one block leftover, and it can go into the orphan bin. I've got all three of these quilts sewn into rows, and hopefully all three will be assembled today. I'm not planning on borders for any of them, just a burgundy binding, so once the rows are sewn together, I can press the three quilt tops and hang them in the quilt closet. When quilts don't need borders, it's pretty easy to assemble them as leaders/enders. 

As I'm getting quilt tops together and hanging them in the quilt closet, my sewing room is feeling a bit lighter with every top done. Sometimes putting projects away is the answer, other times you just need to sew your way out of the mess. 

I debated on just concentrating on the deadline projects, but honestly, my attitude is better if I'm working on a project of my choice at the same time I'm working on deadline quilt. 

Now that my cutting table is cleared off, I can work on cutting out the scrub tops for DH. Those will get done a lot faster now that I have my no quilting weekends.

So many projects to work on, and I keep seeing things online about Christmas, and I just can't go there! The last couple years I've just had a really hard hard time getting into a Christmas-y mood, and making things for Christmas is becoming harder and harder. It's not that I don't like giving gifts, or even that I don't like making gifts, I like doing both of those. What I don't like is the pressure, the time restraints, the trying to top whatever I did last year, the sheer number of presents that need to be made if I make them. I told DH I feel like gift cards may be the way to go this year, if I can't get into it. With five kids and their spouses and a dozen grandkids plus other family members we buy for it's just overwhelming me. That's NOT what Christmas is about. 

I keep reading about supply chains being broken, and how things may be hard to find for the holidays, and that's easy to believe when there are things at the grocery store that are hard to get even now. I'm also well aware of how much stuff everyone already has. I really like giving activities for gifts, movie tickets, zoo passes, or restaurant gift cards, but with Covid numbers still going crazy I'm not sure I want to go that route either. Last year I finally came up with giving family gifts and going for a game night theme for at least the families with children old enough for that. Once I had decided on that, it was easier to get in the Christmas mood. I'm still waiting for inspiration to strike this year, and I'm sure hoping it does!

Vacuuming the Clothes Dryer

 My plan to work on non-quilting projects on the weekends is going pretty well. The stack of burp rag pieces that have been on my fabric counter for months, are now all sewn into burp rags, I clipped the edges, washed and dried them twice to get the edges to rag nicely, and now they are stacked up in the gift closet. 

I never counted how many pieces I had cut, I was just cutting up all the flannel I had that was too small to back a baby quilt. If it was too small to cut a burp rag, I cut 4.5" squares, and if it was too small for that, I tossed it guilt free! I ended up with 60 burp rags, which will be several baby gifts ready to go. The flannel made such a mess in the washer and dryer, I got out the vacuum and the crevice tool and vacuumed the washer and dryer after each load. With that much lint in the dryer I figured it could be a fire hazard, so I used the crevice tool to get down into the area below the lint filter. Now the only flannel in the house is either yardage large enough to back at least a baby quilt, or 4.5" squares. Everything between those two sizes is now burp rags. I found I liked using four layers of flannel best for the burp rags. If I only had one or two of a pattern I usually used it for the middle layers. 

I've been FMQ my hour per day, but I'm not finished the wedding quilt yet. I think I can get it done in two more hours of quilting. Even with a concentrated effort it takes a while to quilt a king sized quilt on a domestic machine. 

After my hour of FMQ on the weekdays, I've been all over the place on quilting projects. 

This is folded into fourths for the photo, but I've got the center of this quilt done. It's getting three borders, one of which is pieced, so still a ways to go on this.  

I made this quilt about three years ago, a wedding gift for one of my nieces. I had a full extra strip set left over, as well as part of another. It was too much to make something like a pillow, but not automatically enough to make a quilt. I stumbled upon a photo of a bargello quilt with black strips between the strip sets, and realized that could be the perfect project  for the leftover stripsets I had. 

All the black strips are the same width, though because the other strips aren't the same width, your eyes may trick you into thinking the black ones are different too. The second quilt is pretty tall and skinny at this point, but thankfully I had packed the stripsets away with any extra fabric I had. Since I bought the fabrics specifically for my nieces bargello quilt, I had very little leftover, except for the border fabric. I don't have a ton of the original border fabric left, but enough to have a plan on how to use it to make the quilt wider. I've got an idea to make a pieced border for just the sides, then I'll add a narrow black border all the way around. I think it will have much more balanced dimensions then. Sometimes a scrap quilt doesn't end up looking like one!

So it looks like I'll be working on borders, and my weekend project is to stuff the weighted blanket that's ready to fill. Hopefully I'll be binding that wedding quilt soon too! It's about 80% quilted now. DH has a four day weekend this weekend, so I'm not sure how much quilting time I'll actually have. I know he has some plans, so likely more time than I think. Once I get the current wedding quilt finished, I'll switch over to piecing the last wedding quilt for this year. It's not as large, nor as many pieces, so I don't think it will take a very long time to piece.