My Merry Month of May Mini

After dithering for years about the whats and hows of finishing this little very heavy and stiff batik pictorial piece, I finally bit the bullet and finished it this month.  After playing around with the broken dishes blocks idea for the border, I opted for this plain and simple surround for the batik. 

Quilting the batik was a bear to say the least!  Lots of tension issues.  Thankfully I didn't waste good fabric on the back and just used a plain white well-washed sheet.  Which ended up being a good choice since the back is a hot mess!  

The day was nice and I tried a few photos outside.  The grass was getting long and the quilt wouldn't lie flat but I kind of liked the wavy appearance and the deep green background.

Happy to finally have this finished, though no idea what I'll do with it!  I'll link up when Wendy at The Constant Quilter posts her monthly roundup of mini-makers at the end of the month.  

Rainy, cold weekend in store for us.  We need the rain, though the timing wasn't great for all the weekend warriors.  We'll stay off the roads and have soup for supper, maybe some hot biscuits to go with, and there are strawberries for shortcake if we don't snack on them beforehand.  Hope you're enjoying this holiday weekend and remembering all those real warriors who gave their lives for our freedoms.  May their sacrifice not be in vain.

A Simply Easy Friday Finish

 So, evenings I've begun the hand quilting on my Diamond Jubilee quilt, and there are four more flimsies awaiting machine quilting soon.  Needing something easy to work on at quilt ministry a couple weeks ago, I pulled two older donated fabrics from the church stash and cut some long strips.  Easy-peasy piecing on the Singer 201, and the next day I pulled three fabrics from my home stash, made a back, found leftovers from some 100% cotton batting who-knows-how-old, pieced a frankenbatt, fired up the Janome and this is the result.

This is destined for our nursing home ministry, likely for someone who is bedridden since its finished measurement after washing is 49x67 inches, too large for a wheelchair quilt.

Wondering if anyone has a clue as to the age of the printed fabric.  It was 40 inches selvedge to selvedge, no manufacturer identification in the selvedges.  The red solid is also older I think, measuring just 39 inches selvedge to selvedge. And it was a real lint magnet, catching every little bit of wayward batting. Even after washing and drying every red strip required the lint roller.  Hopefully it will behave itself now that it's completed.

I ditch quilted the seams between the strips, did a serpentine stitch within the red strips, then changed to my FMQ foot and followed the lines of tiny green flowers outlining the motifs.  The quilting shows up a little better on the back.

Quick and easy, and hopefully will bring comfort and some nostalgia to its eventual recipient.

We've had a couple days of mid-high 80s and sunshine and it's feeling like summer may be just around the corner.  I began setting out the zinnias started inside a few weeks ago, but had to quit before noon because of the intense heat.  Maybe next week we can get our tomato starts out into the garden.

While photographing the quilt I noticed these just beginning to bloom.

This "bush" is probably 30 feet high now, and its blooms are all above my head.  This variety doesn't have a heavy aroma like many lilacs, but we enjoy their blooms for the short period that we have them.

What is very disheartening this spring is the absence of honeybees in our immediate area.  I have literally seen none in my walks around the yard and hubby has only spotted one or two. We'll need to pay close attention when the tomatoes begin blooming, and may have to hand pollinate them with a little brush.  

The trail cam showed a black bear close to the house the other night, no doubt hoping the suet feeder would have been refilled after he made off with the previous block a week or so before (it wasn't).  It was around 2 a.m., thankfully he didn't arouse the dog with his presence nearby, and left without damaging the rail fence or pulling down the feeder post as he's done in prior years.  A huge porcupine was spotted in the woods beyond the creek a week or so ago when hubby and Gibbs were out on their daily hike. Thankfully Gibbs obeys perfectly when they are on the mountain, so he escaped any quill attack.  

That's about it from our little corner of the world.  Hoping to have my May mini finished by the end of next week.  

Hope the sun is shining where you are!

Ruby

It all began with a set of twelve leftover basket blocks from my French Country Strippy quilt of a year or two ago (from Fons & Porter's Fat Quarter Friendly book).  

It's time to be thinking about donation quilts for the upcoming Labor Day church camp auction.  Basket quilts are good ones for this auction, so we set about finding something for the setting triangles that would coordinate with the baskets.  Hubby was convinced this tomato soup red was better than any of the other choices in my stash (mostly tan to brown prints).  Maybe, though it really began the long saga of finding something - anything - that would remotely go with ...  I had some border fabrics leftover from the previous quilt, and they really looked the best, but of course there was not enough.  Nor was there anything else in the stash that either had enough or even began to blend in with what was already on the design wall ... sigh.  This quilt was already angry, flat-out refusing anything I offered.  

So, rather than pitching it into the waste basket next to the sewing machine I figured if nothing was going to play nicely why not introduce something new and that's where we ended up.  I grabbed a piece of this older "Kashmir Style" by Hoffman fabric and some blue solids and introduced them, the Kashmir has both red and blue, even if none of the basket blocks has a speck of blue, and we went with that.

A semi-sunny day a couple weeks ago, in an attempt to get a couple photos that would somewhat capture the colors and sheen of the beautiful border fabric.  You guessed it, the quilt refused to cooperate, exhibiting its continuing fury thusly.

And of course the camera failed to pick up any of the gold highlights that make that border fabric so wonderful, even on the closer shots, which I won't bore you with.  

While watching this little quilty temper tantrum, the perfect name came to me.  There's an old country song called Ruby, are you Mad at your Man.  And here it is, as sung by Rhiannon Giddens.  See if you agree.  

  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV6Xs-0jmeQ

Ruby it is.  And I can't decide whether I love it or hate it.  Lukewarm is probably a better descriptor of my feelings at this point.  

 

April's Mini

 There's cheater fabric, and I suppose there's also a cheater mini.  Like when you receive several baggies of quilt "parts" from a non-blogging quilter who  decides to rid her stash of some extras.  Sometimes a baggie can hold 23 feet worth of 1-1/2 inch finished HST blocks, another baggie might hold the beginning of a quilt plan cut short.  That would be this mini.

A really nice start, but since I had no particular ideas on how I might want to build on it, and it is a perfect table topper size I decided to just sandwich it after piecing a backing, and get some free motion quilting practice before working on the FMQ stencils on Younger than Springtime, seen in my last post.

This is the backing, pieced from four smaller pieces of a fallish batik.

Happy to be joining in Wendy's Monthly Mini Challenge at The Constant Quilter.  I'll link to her post on Friday.  Please have a look at other quilters' challenge quilts, the ones I've seen so far are wonderful!

It began raining hard late yesterday afternoon, subsided a bit overnight, but today has been a non-stop deluge.  Hubby finally put the rain gauge out around 2:00 this afternoon and after a couple hours we are closing in on 2 inches.  Hard to say what the total has been since last evening, but from the look of our back yard we are no longer in a drought locally.  The photo appears a bit grainy since it was raining so hard, but the water has inundated the rear portion of our yard, the creek is well over its banks. Thankfully it "shouldn't" come much closer to the house as we are on a little rise.  But the unfinished basement will see some water by tomorrow and the sump pump will be making itself useful once again.

Younger Than Springtime - Finished!

 After finishing stitching the last of the binding down last night, I popped this quilt in the wash for its beauty bath.  Today it was sunny when I returned home from quilt ministry so outdoors we went for a few photos.

Loving how soft and spring-like this turned out!

This one gave me no grief whatsoever in the making - probably because I'd made a similar version a couple years ago for donation.  This one will stay with me at least for this summer, I want it on my bed!  Someday it will go to my granddaughter. But maybe not too soon.

The quilting is a mix of big stitch hand quilting and machine free-motion quilting.  The larger square areas between sashings are a machine quilted stencil, and the narrower blocks and borders are hand quilted in a variety of colors of Aurifil 12 wt.  

The backing fabric is a lightweight almost gauze type fabric, giving the quilt a wonderful softness.  I love this backing and would have purchased more if it had been available.  It's been waiting for a special quilt for a couple years now.  

My faithful companion keeping his distance - he was soaking wet from multiple creek-swimming excursions out back.  Temps reached 78 degrees today, what a lovely surprise after snow three days last week.

I'll hopefully be back with a mini later this week, and maybe next week a peek at a not-so-successsful top that was also finished yesterday. Maybe finished isn't quite the right word for it, but you gotta show the bad with the good, right?

In the meantime, happy stitching!

Lady Sings the Blues - a finished quilt top

This quilt began with a box of twelve orphan basket blocks, the rejects after my friend L completed her own quilt made from a kit of Barbara Brackman's Baltimore Blues.  My friend is a perfectionist and these blocks failed to pass muster for several reasons, basket points too close to the edge, a variety of finished sizes, not square, etc.  By themselves they looked pretty bland to my eyes, but the first thing on the agenda was to border them  and then trim them all to the same size.  But the overarching goal was to preserve as many of the basket points as possible in the process.  Believe me when I say there are a LOT of 1/8" seams in this quilt!

So, after a couple days, we had this.  Still a bit bland but getting better, thanks to enough scraps of that delightful blue floral to fussy cut cornerstones for the sashing.

Last week while sorting through some bins of donated fabrics for our quilt ministry I found what to my eyes would be a perfect border to add more fun to this top.  Lucky for me there was one 18 inch wide strip about 76 inches long.  Enough for the side borders.  It just happened to be a drapery fabric from 1986 according to the selvedge, a bit heavier than quilting cotton, but perfectly serviceable.

For top and bottom borders I tried out a serpentine strip of a similar peachy-pink on solid navy blue.  Really wanted to keep that peachy vibe going since it seemed to invigorate the entire quilt.  And tada, a finished top!

The "stained glass" shot

Kitten approved

Not sure what that streak is in the bottom center of these last photos, suspect it's just a shadow cast by a fold in the center. 

I've been smitten with large-scale prints after using this one, actually there are a couple in my stash that have been waiting for years to be used.  I think their waiting days are about to end!  

Hubby brought the little bistro table and two chairs out to the back porch, and this morning it was sunny and over 60 degrees out, warm enough to enjoy my first summer latte on the porch.  Just waiting now for the hummingbirds to return and the flowers to appear!

Happy Wednesday!

The first mini I ever made

 After seeing Kyle's wonderful adaptation of an antique miniquilt yesterday, I was reminded of the first mini quilt I ever made, way back in the mid-late 1980s.  Though I had a few quilts under my belt by that time, being a young mother working in a home-based business and restoring an early 19th century home, etc. etc., there was precious little time left for quilting.

That Christmas, I think it was either 1987 or 1988, we purchased an American Girls doll for our young daughter. With limited funds, there was no money for any of her accessories, so we enlisted the help of my father-in-law to make a copy of Kirsten's bed. At Thanksgiving he brought us the bed, a faithful copy of the one in the catalog, though unpainted. I bought a set of patterns and set about making the doll's entire wardrobe as well as the bedding for the bed.  Bedding consisted of a blue and white ticking mattress and pillow, antique linen sheets and pillowcase made from scraps left in the house by a previous owner, and a quilt.

This is the only photo I have of the quilt, taken many years later by my daughter when she was sorting through boxes of her childhood dolls, etc.  The fabrics were scraps left over from making her first big-girl bed quilt a few years earlier, probably around 1985.  

The wooden doll bed needed paint and decoration,  so I found a book on rosmaling  and attempted a simple design on the headboard after painting the bed a light blue.  Sadly, there are no photos of the bed, however I'd also found an unfinished hinged wood box that I painted the same light blue and did a tiny bit of rosmaling on.  Kirsten's wardrobe was stored in this box.

So, all this reminiscing to say that I have no new mini this month.  Another large quilt top in the works though, which will become a donation for the local church camp's annual auction.  It's looking like it will be a go for them having a regular summer camp schedule this year, and they will need the auction proceeds to fund scholarships for children who cannot afford the full cost, and for camp upkeep.  

So, to see a lot of wonderful new mini quilts, go to Wendy's (Constant Quilter) post to see a delightful assortment!  Thanks to Wendy for hosting this mini parade every month!

Until next time, happy stitching!

A Design Wall, Pins, Scotch Tape, and a Top is Born

 My diamond jubilee quilt top is finished.  Mixed emotions about this one, on the one hand thinking it is a hot mess, but absolutely loving so many of the details.  It was definitely a challenge quilt from beginning to this point, and that was exactly what my beginning goal was, to see if I could make a pattern this complex.  I wanted a brain challenge, and boy did I achieve that goal!

This month has been spent doing what I thought would be the easy part of the process, stitching up 324 flying geese for the sashings.  After all the sunflower blocks pretty much went together without a major hitch, how hard could flying geese be?  Turns out the geese became a huge growling bear!  I cut the first few according to the pattern directions and after attempting to trim them up using my bloc-loc flying geese ruler, they were coming out too small.  Cut larger pieces, but still many of them did not trim perfectly to size.  At that point "done is better than perfect" became the slogan of the week, along with Gwen Marston's advice that if it's to small, add something, and if too large cut something off.  I've really come to appreciate her sage advice!

So, a few photos of the assembly process.

The pins and scotch tape starting to come into play - this thing is WAY bigger than my design wall!

Trying out the setting triangles

Taping around the door frame, more pins, decisions-decisions!

At this point I decided to add a narrow border using the same setting fabric.  While pinning that border I happened to walk in the room and saw this stained glass effect.

The sun was getting low in the sky and as soon as that last border was stitched I ran outside to see if we could achieve the same stained glass look of the entire quilt.  But the sun was just disappearing behind the hill and the stained glass effect was all washed out by the low angle light.  And now it's rain, rain, rain in the forecast for the next several days.

Really difficult to get an accurate photo of that setting/border fabric.  It's much darker than it appears here, probably because it's an older 1980s or 90s print and the fabric is a bit thinner than some of the newer reproductions.  The setting fabric is more true to its color in the lower left corner of this next photo, which also happens to be one of my favorite blocks.

 

This will be next in the hand quilting lineup, and hopefully it will become a finished quilt sometime during my diamond jubilee year.  

The first snowdrops have bloomed by the garage where the sun has warmed the soil this past week.  A few other green shoots are popping up here and there, though the snow still lingers along the edge of the woods where sunlight doesn't reach.  This may be the week I sow the tomato seeds in their little containers though and that will seem to make spring that much more real in our neck of the woods.

Hope your Wednesday is going well, and that you have some happy sewing to fill your days!