Radio Silence

I hadn't meant to stay quiet for so long, but although I've been busy, I haven't had much to point to and exclaim, "TA-DA!"

This morning I put the final quilting stitch into Sugar Skull. I'd decided on diamonds in the white strips, which meant straight-line quilting, which meant my Brother 1500 on the "dinner" table.

A finish, and more

I haven't blogged in over a week, but I've been plenty busy! Thing 2 got home today after 9 days away, so the first thing I had him do, once we were both awake, was hold my most recent finish, Sunburst:

70" x 85"

This is the last of the N1C tops. I started it in June 2018, but getting involved with Community First! Quilters really pushed it across the finish line.

Stash

As soon as I saw the donated partial bolt of fabric I knew exactly what flimsy it was meant for, so I took it home with me after one of the Community First! Quilters meetings. The sheer amount of fabric made it a good candidate for trying the folding-and-pinning method of washing/drying (works wonderfully, and well worth the effort).

(I know, you feel like you jumped in at the middle of the story, don't you? It'll resolve soon.)

Recently,  after washing/drying the last couple of quilts and measuring how much shrinkage resulted, I padded the raw flimsy guidelines to 74"x94" (for a Twin). Suddenly, that perfect piece of backing yardage was a smidge too small, and I'd have to embiggen it with some of my stash.

My stash isn't huge; I'm not sure I'd even categorize it as "large", but in it I found two perfect pieces.

I'll show the resulting back in a future post, once I've finished quilting everything together.

This serendipitous find led me to ponder a few things, such as 1) how great it is to have a place (or two) to donate my handiwork, 2) how great it is to have a definite size (limit, in some cases) to work within, 3) how lucky I continue to be to have just the right fabric on hand for making/finishing these tops, and 4) would anyone care what my stash looks like?

A finish

Yay!

 

This is roughly 70"x88". I added the stripe border to build it out to closer meet the Twin guideline of 70"x90".

Double the Pleasure

These were made (made), sandwiched (sandwiched), and quilted back-to-back (time-wise, not fabric-wise), then finished (= washed, dried, photographed) yesterday:

Back to Quilts

This sugar skull project has been a flimsy for several weeks now, but it's been bunched up on the end of my ironing board waiting for me to finish the October banner and get back to quilt making. I ironed the final 9 seams this morning, then flang it on the floor for its photo-op.

Cat scans improve everything. 70" x 90"

Another finish

This . . .

. . . was successfully transformed into this . . .

64" x 86"

. . . earlier this week. It's been washed and dried and is ready to hand over next weekend at the monthly Community First! Quilters meeting.

Finishes

 My first finish this month: the August walker banner.

A closer (and clearer) look:

What appears to be small 4-patches is really fabric printed with small square designs.

Final Trip to the N1C Stash

Since I had committed to a classic radiating design for one of the last two tops, I decided that the final TATW top would be laid out as a chevron, with the dusty rose fabric as the only element of continuity. Three attempts at a layout finally brought me to this:

Not the full top, but enough to show the design. The lines follow the dusty rose fabric.

Penultimate TATW

Burying threads is a great way to spend time thinking of other things, such as the layouts for the final two N1C (Not 100% Cotton) quilts. I had been spending my days (after using up my 'good' vision quilting first thing in the morning) sewing up the strips for tops 5 and 6. I knew by now that I wanted the classic Trip Around the World setting for one set of strips, but offset. So: to the computer! I set up a 5x7 grid and started plopping in images of one of the blocks I had sewn up, et voila:

Obsess much?

My various Leader/Ender projects, brought in as I finished one N1C top after another this past week or three, ended up being their own finishes as well. For a while it was hard to tell which project was Leading or Ending, so I just thought of everything being constructed as "Followers".

I also had an apostrophe as to where I could hang the flimsies while it remained so cold outside: on the living room drapes! The piano blocks a lower corner, but the overall effect remains.

The first top, in which I ended up with non-nestling seam allowances:

N1C Scrappy Trip Around the World (planned placement), 60"x84"

Proof

 "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Just sayin'. Unless you make yours with high-content alcohol, there is never proof in the pudding.

But on to the real topic of this post: nestling Scrappy Trip Around the World seams.

I started sewing together the shoe box full of carefully stowed strips last week. I couldn't wait to get 4 blocks constructed and on the design wall!

TATW, with intent

Right after finishing the last N1C TATW, I pulled out the shoe box of several hundred N1C strips and grabbed all the pink/juvenile ones sitting on top. To those I added some green check, medium blue, a red, and whatever other light or mostly-white fabrics I could dig up until I had 210 strips to work with (35 blocks for a 5x7 layout). This will be a very random and mostly 'low volume' top, definitely for a child. This time I was going to iron, construct, and lay out every block the same. Would all the seams nestle then?

I had only two criteria: no samesies touching, and doubles were okay (just not side-by-side). In fact, due to the sheer volume of them, most blocks would need two strips of the green check. With that, I just reached into the box holding the jumble of strips and kept pairing a random strip to a green check, pairing and sewing until 210 strips were down to 105 pairs. The pairs got randomly sewn into segments of fours until 35 were made, then the remaining pairs were sewn onto those.

Only five blocks were constructed of six 16" strips. The rest were made up of what I refer to as "short stacks": 16+ inch-long strips in toto, but that length was made up of 2 or 3 segments, as above. Creating a final TATW block from these means lots of fits and starts, which really eats up any L&E project being sewn alongside.

TATW, thoughts on.

 Nearly a year ago, near the end of one of my care-giver breaks, I made 35 scrappily planned Trip Around the World blocks. Without a home or drawer or closet into which I could shove them once done, they lurked atop any stable surface on my cutting area. Until yesterday.

Looking for something easy to stitch together, I decided to grab that pile, forgo any previous ideas of grouping like fabrics to create subsections of control and order within the inherent scrappiness, divide the pile roughly in half, and sew together pairs of blocks with abandon. Let's hear it for spontaneity!

Except...

Invasion of the Sleep Snatcher

The whole time I was working on my mother's quilt, another project kept simmering in the back of my mind. It wasn't simmering quietly, either. It was actively invading my sleep with weird dreams. So, as soon as I could in the evening after I finished "Jackson" (my goofy name for it, not my mother's!), I set to work preparing for Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Trip Around the World using all those 2.5" strips cut from my bin of N1C (Not 100% Cotton) fabrics last week.

First thing I did was sort those 600-700 strips into lights/mediums/darks. Lots of hard squinting as I examined all those strips covering my cutting table, trying to determine whether a light or dark was really a medium (and vice-versa). That brought me to dinnertime. After another night of weird dreams, I was more than ready to take inventory and figure out my plan of attack.

One more albatross

There was still a bin weighing heavily on my psyche while I was in Oregon and even more so when I got back home and added more to it from the scraps I brought back with me: my N1C (Not 100% Cotton) bin.

I'm wonkin', yes indeed...

Well, most of the project bags are done; they've all been machine sewn, and now there are only 4 left that need one lining seam hand-sewn together.

Most of them came out quite nicely, but one of the fabrics (used in 3 bags) did not stand up well to all the handling, crunching, and manipulating involved in getting these to the finished stage. I don't know if it was the iron-on stabilizer, or the fabric itself, or a combination of the two, but terrible wrinkles and puckering resulted.

I don't know if I'll offer these at half price, or rip them apart and use the zippers (and perhaps the handles) for another project. Since the chorus concert at which I'll be selling these has been moved up to June, I have several weeks to decide.

Wonkiness

Last summer I finally fell to the sirens' call of Wonky Stars. At least, I bought in to the idea of making them, and dug a bunch of neutral 2.5"x4.5" pieces from my Scrap User System's 2-1/2" box. To those I added all the small and dark triangles from my triangle box, and there they sat at the side of my sewing table, ignored, for several months.

As whims do.

The Shoo-Fly Leader-Ender project had stalled because I still needed to cut more pieces for the negative color blocks, so last month while assembling the QAYG behemoth and completing the first steps of fourteen Embryonic Pod Things, I started grabbing these for my leader-enders.

CATalyst

I lost my sewing mojo at some time between the disappearering act and the Impeachment Act; I've got it back now, thanks to little fix-it projects around the house and the cats' persnickety ways.

When I made this tower, I was under the (well-researched) impression that cats love to scratch sisal rope.

They certainly loved scratching the upholstery-fabric-covered posts (Franklin is sniffing one of them), but they never ever touched the sisal post, little pills that they are.

Sister done!

Just a quick photo op:

60"x86"

She spent the last couple of days wadded up in a laundry basket. Not the best conditions for a photo op.

She washed up so cuddly! I think the loose Stacked Snailz had something to do with that, along with the Warm & Natural franken-batt.

Onto the donation stack, and eventually she'll find her forever home.