January Scrappiness

 Hello friends!  To celebrate the first month of this new year with something beside snowstorms, I have one finished quilt and a completed flimsy!  Besides a cat on my lap as I type this, he's ever so good a helper pretty much all day long as he's bored silly in the house and too cold to spend much time outdoors.

Anyhow, here is my first completed quilt for this new year.  In my last post of 2025 I had just completed a triangle top made of batik scraps.  That quilt is currently in the quilting process.  But, there were leftover triangles, lots of them, and those leftovers have now become a finished quilt destined for our quilt ministry.

The flimsy, measuring about 50x65 inches:

And now finished:

Lots of brights in this one!!  The back (hopefully) used up all that orange/yellow batik from who-knows-when-or-where ...

My favorite way of quilting these triangle quilts is shown above, lots of long straight-line quilting paralleling the seams with stitching lines approximately 3/4 inch apart.  No ditch quilting since the triangles are pieced with the seams pressed open rather than to one side.  

Late last year I pulled my box of 2-1/2 inch squares and began making scrappy16-patch blocks during our quilt ministry meetings (lots of mindless sewing which is great for getting some stitching done in the midst of all our ongoing conversations, show-and-tells, coffee and snacking, and helping each other with the boring stuff like sandwiching and pinning our quilt tops).  I ended up with 59 16-patch blocks, and pieced some of them into this simple top.

I couldn't get far enough away to capture the entire top nor get a good rendition of the color of the solid blocks.  The top measures about 72 inches square.  The next photo shows the light green alternate blocks closer to their true color.

My plan is to quilt this with a serpentine stitch using a variegated thread.  A second top is in the planning stage using the remaining 16-patch blocks in an on-point setting.  

All of these projects are destined for our quilt ministry as we have more than enough quilts around here to keep us warm.  My goal for the year is to use up as much yardage as I can from stash and get more simple quilts completed and out the door, and reduce the number of overflowing bins around the perimeter of my sewing room.  Wish me luck!

Til next time, in these dark days may we all be a light for others in our circle of acquaintances.