April's Accomplishments

 As April winds to a close, it was a busy month with several goals met.

Savvy and Abby have regular play sessions, several times daily. Some happy mud wrestling and lots of chase and tug. He will be 5 months old this week and starts Rally Obedience training next month. He is now as long, if not longer than Sera and about to be as tall as she is. Soon she will be back to being the smallest dog in the house.

I've been out and about, finally remembered to plan to attend our quilt guild meeting this past Monday, then we had a zoom bee on Tuesday.

One Monthly Goal & Projects Half Done

Gus's Camo Quilt (Pecking Order) moved from a pile of blocks to a flimsy in need of borders over the last weekend. What started as, I'll get these stacked and ready to sew together (my goal was to complete the last of the blocks) moved to, "I can get the rows sewn together" to "wow, the center is done." Monday at guild, I auditioned a few borders during social hour and Tuesday night got the first of the small borders cut and pinned. 

I also have a finish - meeting my One Monthly Goal: the Rose Chandelier is bound and ready. I do need to make two small repairs on the back thanks to Savvy who offered to chew on it again while I was binding. After his morning play session, he actually fell asleep on the couch with me while I was stitching. Puppies are cute when they sleep. While not a UFO, this is a new finish for 2022 complete.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Two more penguins joined my waddle this month (it would be a raft if they were in the water). Pink for April.

Teal for February.  Waiting to see the color for May, I'll likely be adding more modern blocks as well as a new penguin in May, possibly two as I need to start making some large penguins as well.

Until next month, Savvy says have fun and play in the mud (or whatever makes you happy).

Linking to:

Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2022 - Hosted by Angela at So Scrappy

One Monthly Goal - Hosted by Elm Street Quilts

PHD in 2022 - Hosted by Quilting Gail

Where did April go?

 I woke up Saturday convinced it was the last Saturday in April. Happily we have another week. 

Savvy and his partner in crime, Abby, have been dominating my Saturdays as I have back to back obedience classes with them. Won't schedule that again, especially as it is heating up and harder to manage leaving a dog in the car. I look at the weather each Saturday morning to guestimate if I might accidentally cook a puppy. One more class to go, and if it is too hot, someone is staying home.

Two more penguins have been added to my collection. I accidentally switched beak/foot fabrics and decided I like the contrast better, so didn't rip anything out. These are fun!

I am about halfway done binding the Rose Chandelier.

Sadly, I found two little rips in the backing, likely from when Gus yanked the quilt away from Savvy. I think it caught on the metal crate. So I'll be spending some time this week appliqueing some little hearts or roses on the back to protect the repair. I'm planning to tuck a little fusible web underneath to hold the fabric in place. I also need to make the label.

And finally - I have not only finished sewing corners onto Gus's Camo quilt squares, I utilized a few phone and zoom calls with family, and got everything trimmed an pressed, and have even assembled the center of the quilt.

Next step is to audition border fabrics. In true Gus form, 'whatever you like Mom.' I know the big border will utilize the national parks fabric - topographical maps. Suits the quilt theme quite well. I'm trying to decide if I want an inner border, and if so, which one.

Overall, this has been a productive month, and I'm heading for the home stretch with a finish and a leap forward.

April Goals - Thinking Pink!

Today's quilting journey is brought to you by the Letter P. P for Pink and P for Pissed off Puppy! This is not the face of innocence. This is the face of someone who happily shredded the batting and backing of a freshly pinned quilt.  Thankfully Gus caught him in the act and rescued the quilt before any real damage was done (he spared the top) to the quilt or to the puppy. I can't be certain he won't poop out a pinmoor or two, but no pins are in the puppy, nor is any batting as he left the shreds in the crate with him.  I'm not entirely certain how his crate got moved forward. It is tucked under my cutting table, and I was careless and didn't notice that it was out farther than normal which allowed him to grab a bit of quilt backing and pull in in to pounce on it. But enough on the world's cutest puppy. Here are my goals for April.

One Monthly Goal & Rainbow Scrap Challenge

This month, my monthly goal is a new start, or a new to 2022 start. I pieced the Rose Chandelier quilt in March. My goal is to finish it and gift it at a baby shower later this month. I find that having hard deadlines helps me to meet these goals. 

The  pinks came out of my stash, some of them from my 'what was i thinking stack' and several scraps from last year's foray into pink. Speaking of, I won't be working on my City Sampler Modern Quilt Blocks this month as I have a set in pink. I will be making a Pink Penguin sometime this month.

This should be an easy finish for me as I'm about halfway through quilting the background now. Thankfully Savvy's assistance only ripped parts that will be trimmed off at the end. He did thin some of the batting along one edge, so I tucked some thinned batting over the parts he thinned to repair it.

I found a glorious batik for the backing!

PHD in 2022

A secondary goal for the month is to work on piecing my son's Camo Quilt.  The pattern is Pecking Order from Missouri Star Quilt Company. 

I've been using this as a leader/ender project this year which has solved some of the tedium of adding endless corners to the so-called 6 inch blocks. So-called because when I started cutting them at a Bee Retreat in 2019, I somehow cut them 6 x 5 7/8. But as I can't seem to sew a corner on straight to save my life, I've been gradually trimming them back to 5 3/4 x 5 3/4.  I've been pressing and trimming in batches while on zoom calls with my family - which definitely helps me get past the tedium of the trimming.  I have 32 corners left to add/trim/press and then I can start the process of randomly pairing green and brown blocks together as I piece the rows of the quilt. I found a great camouflage back for this and will use some of the National Parks map fabric for the borders. Gus's request was for a Camo themed quilt, and I think this will meet that goal.

Ravelry UFO Challenge & Table Scraps

I've nominated 9 projects for the quarterly Ravelry UFO Challenge: 

1. Rose Chandelier
2. Gus's Camo Quilt
3. Coastal Pearls
4. Sandy Breeze
5. Country Lanes Runner
6. Daisy Top
7. Celestial Circles
8. Dr. Seuss Log Cabin
9. Dash 

I'll be happy with two to three finishes (most of these are on my PHD in 2022 list). One should be assured - I'm all about the low hanging fruit!

Table Scraps this month incorporates words, so this will be a good month to create a new nametag for myself!

Linking to:

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - Hosted by So Scrappy

One Monthly Goal - April Goals Hosted by Elm Street Quilts

March Round Up

 I spent more time sewing this month and more time planning. Both positives!

One Monthly Goal & Projects Half Done

I have a finish for the month! I completed the Sunflower Table Runner at long last! This was my OMG for March and one of my PhD in 2022 nominations. This is one of the projects in Quilter's Academy Vol 1 - Freshman Year by Harriet Hargrave and Carrie Hargrave. Class 170: Lesson 4: Combined Grids. The lesson in this project was YUMS - Your Unique Measurements. One key to a YUM is consistency in your seam allowance so that your pieces fit together correctly.

As I prepared to finish this quilt, I thought about a variety of quilt plans and motifs - one of which included huge feathers coursing across the runner.

In the end, I decided on  more modest plan with continuous curve flowers centered on each yellow patch, and a loopy meander through the rest of the background. The borders are quilted with an echoed chain of swirls. The echoes came in to play when I felt like the initial swirls were smaller than they should be and rather than pull them out to start over, I started echoing.

A couple other decisions were made on the fly. I picked out a cute floral fabric from my stash for the back. When the time came to sandwich the quilt, that length of fabric was nowhere to be found. So, I looked at my bag of scraps for this quilt and found that there was still a good sized piece of the border fabric left. Not wide enough for the full back, but close enough that I could attach some of the scatter fabric used on the front to each side to make it wide enough.

I also created a Frankenbatting from the offcuts of the Starbright quilts to use up scraps. 

I used a red blender to bind the quilt that was in my scrap bag, but turned out not to be the same red that was used in the body of the quilt, Happily, at a distance from the center, it is not clashing. I practiced binding by machine and decided I really don't like the process. I find it frustrating as I still haven't managed to attach the binding to the first side and leave the appropriate amount to fold over. Some of my hiccups will be less obvious once the runner is washed. I do need to create a label for this (as well as some of my other recent finishes).

This finish brings my total UFO finishes for the year to 5!

Linking to:

One Monthly Goal - March Finish - Hosted by Elm Street Quilts

PhD in 2022 - March - Hosted by Quilting Gail

Corgi News

 We have a new resident!

Savvy is a Brindle Cardigan Welsh Corgi. He is currently 16 weeks of pure puppy. He is sporting a crown (or mouse ears depending on my mood) to help his ears stand tall. He was bred by my friend Sara Austin of Salty Creek Cardigans.

Sera is really not sure what to do with him. Most of the time she thinks he is pretty okay. But there are days where he harasses her until she plays with him.  Cardigans are a bit larger than Pembrokes, have even bigger ears, and they keep their tails.

First walk using his 'big boy' leash. He wasn't quite sure about it and is demonstrating use of the side eye - something Corgis are exceptionally good at.

Based on his last vet visit, we expect he will be about 36 pounds when mature, so half again as large as Sera. He has massive feet! He will live the performance life, starting in Rally and likely moving on to Agility when he matures.

Yellow! Wrapping up the month

 

I got a late start on the Penguin Parade Quilt Along hosted by designer Annette Ornelas of Southwind Quilts. As I'm going a bit off book and doing rainbow penguins on a midnight blue background, instead of traditionally colored penguins, I decided to spread these out to coincide with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Also, as I was so laser focused on the Starbright quilts in February, I didn't do much other piecing.  I spent a delightful evening prepping the quilt (cutting endlessly) and piecing the Yellow and Red Penguins.

Once I have more done, I'll go in and stitch the curves down on the folded pieces. This will be a fun lap quilt. I've decided to add a piano key border using the rainbow fabrics to enlarge the quilt a bit from the published size.

As I created Yellow blocks last year for my 100 Modern Blocks quilt, I used this month to catch up on the aqua/teal blocks.

As I was doing last year, I used a random number generator to come up with 6 blocks (one for each chapter/style) rather than get stuck trying to pick the perfect six blocks.

So instead of getting stuck choosing blocks, I get stuck choosing fabrics.  We've been alerted that April is Pink, which I did last year, so I'll focus on Penguins and other pink projects next month.

I also worked on the Sunflower Table Runner this past week, and finished quilting - this one incorporates both Yellow and the floral theme for this month's Table Scraps.

Link to:

Table Scraps Challenge - March 2022 - hosted by the Joyful Quilter

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - hosted by So Scrappy

March Goals

One Monthly Goal & PhD in Quilting 2022

 My One Monthly Goal for March is to finish the Sunflower Table Runner which I started back in the fall of 2011.

I finally put mitered borders on this in January!

Sunday, when I went to work on it, I couldn't find the fabric I set aside for the backing, so I started auditioning other fabrics. Then I pulled my bag of scraps from the quilt and found a two yard strip of the border print. Not quite wide enough, but slap on some strips of fabric left over from the front on either side and we are well on our way to a reversible runner.

I then created Frankenbatting from the offcuts from my nephews' quilts and am ready to roll. Just need to finalize a quilting plan, this one is basted and ready to go under the needle. Also need to decide on fabric for the binding.

I'm also planning to work on Coastal Pearls as that one has been basted and ready to go for several years. This was started in Summer 2013 when I participated in the String of Pearls Quilt-along. My sister's birthday is in April - would be nice to get this done and on the way to her before the end of next month.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge and Table Scraps

The color of the month is Yellow/Gold. I made Yellow blocks for my 100 block sampler last month, so I caught up on February's Aqua/Teal over the weekend. I am going to start my penguin parade, so look for a yellow/gold penguin later this month.

The Sunflower Runner works very nicely for this month's Table Scraps!

Linking to: 

One Monthly Goal - Elm Street Quilts