Back to the Beginning

Good morning, my friends. It's still mostly dark out as I'm writing this morning. I read yesterday that we would be getting our first 5:00 p.m. sunset within the next few days. That will be an improvement over the 4:00-hour sunsets we've been getting. The days are getting longer, but it's still dark in the morning. I can see some brightness in the sky, however, and so I'm optimistic for some sunshine today.

We did our grocery shopping yesterday. We were into the low 40's on our return home. The sun was shining, and the kitties were bursting to get outside. They don't stay out long...too cold for their furry bodies, but they enjoy a little outside time just the same.

Before we left, I had time to finish off the Bicycles and Lace piece. It turned out pretty, and I'm glad to have it finished. Except for the quilt borders, this piece will stretch the entire width of the finished quilt.

Here are all the embroidered and pieced blocks I have for it so far.

As I was getting ready to make the next two Shop Hop blocks, Smitty showed up to see what was going on.

He helped me finish the next to blocks for Shop Hop 4.0 This first one was from Sarah's Fabrics in Lawrence, Kansas.

The bug fabric was selected for the many sucking bugs we encountered on this trip. I'd received a nasty tick bite that required a trip to urgent care for some antibiotics. I'd never been bitten by a tick before, and the bite swelled up alarmingly. I didn't get sick from it, but it bothered me for a months afterward. I'd also been driven nearly insane with itching from chiggers. In fact I'd walked all around Hamilton, Missouri, visiting the stores that are a part of Missouri Star Quilt Company with a chigger between my toes. It nearly drove me crazy with itching until I could get back to the RV and see what was up. I thought it was a flare up of athlete's foot fungus, but when I spread my toes, I found that little red sucker. Yeah...he won't bite anyone else ever again.

And that brings me to my next block from the original Missouri Star Quilt Company store. I selected this fabric for the many barns we'd seen in our travels. The scale was almost too large for this block...something to keep in mind for future choices.

These are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

I traced the names for the next two shops to be included. I'll stitch those when I finish the short piece I'm working on right now.

There will be 16 blocks when this quilt is finished. I believe I have about nine fabrics. The rest will need to come from our travels in Alaska and Canada. I'm still wanting to visit The Cotton Patch south of me. They're in a new store, and I haven't included them in any of my other Shop Hop quilts. My other favorite store to the west in McMinnville, Boersma's, should also get a block in this quilt. So, there's nothing to worry about, my friends. We'll fill in those spaces somehow. Clearly, more quilt shop hopping is urgently needed for our upcoming trip to Alaska. I've already included a few shop names on our itinerary.

And that brings me back to the beginning of my whiteboard work flow. Next up will be to quilt the Domestic Affairs quilt. This one will be pretty straightforward insofar as the designs I'll use. It's not unlike the Sundress quilt I finished up a few years ago, and I'll probably use some of the same motifs. In fact, that border fabric was left from the back of the Sundress quilt.

And since I can't quilt for more than an hour without breaking myself, I'll be simultaneously sewing together the Shop Hop 3.0 quilt. Here are all the completed blocks.

I haven't decided yet just how I'm going to sew it together. I'll sash the blocks, but then I'm at a loss about what fabrics I'll use and whether I'll add borders. I'll wait and see how big it is when the sashings are added and then decide. As for fabric...who knows? It might require a shopping trip.

Today is a pedicure day. I don't have any other stops planned along the way. It'll still take a good 2-1/2 hour bite out of my day when I add in driving time. There should still be time to get a little bit of quilting done later this afternoon. 

Before wrapping up for the day yesterday, I took the first stitches on the new "short" Catmint piece.

I'd say it will stitch up fast, but the flowers and leaves will take some time. I have some cute fabrics to finish this off, but that will be down the road some. That's where I'm headed next. Probably I'll eat some breakfast first. There's one small housekeeping chore, but then a mostly sewing day during my at-home hours. And with that, it's time to get started.

Making Progress

Good morning, my friends. The fog never really burned off yesterday. Mike had to drive into town, and he said it was even foggier at the valley floor. It's foggy again this morning, but I peeked at the forecast. It's supposed to burn off into sunshine. We'll see. It's a grocery shopping day, and so I'll be happy if it just doesn't rain. 

When I went downstairs yesterday, I noticed the spider webs and moisture coating the Andromeda just outside our living room window. I took several pictures of it. This was my favorite of the bunch.

I'd worked out four days in a row, and so I took a break. Besides, I had some housework to do. That counts, right? When that was finished, I baked these Healthy Applesauce Oat Muffins. The recipe is from Mel's Kitchen Cafe. I'm making it just a little different from her recipe. I substitute buttermilk for the milk. It'll lower both the calorie and fat content. Each one has about 130 calories.

Raisins or dried cranberries are an option in these. I had just a little left in a bag of dried cranberries, and so I tossed those in too. Those will keep us in pre-breakfast snacks for a few days.

Heading into the sewing room, Smitty took a break from his duties in HR to join me.

I was adding scrappy strips to the half square triangles I made the day before. Smitty helped me pick through my scraps.

In pretty short order, I had the six blocks I needed. They're kind of a half log cabin block.

Then I sewed them into a proper row...

And then sewed that row to the rest of the quilt. There are just three rows to go on this. I'll probably add a border when it's all finished. I'm hoping I still have some of that dark green left. Pretty sure I do.

Next up was to make two more pieced blocks from the centers I embroidered a few weeks ago. First was the Sweetheart's Floral & Gifts block.

And then the Orchard Bakery.

Unless I've miscounted, there are just three more pieced blocks to make for that quilt. Of course, I'm still working on the embroidery.

So, that brings me to the last thing on my list of WIP's...two more blocks for the Shop Hop 4.0 quilt. I've already embroidered the names and places. I just need to sew them together.

As a reminder, I'm making suitcase blocks now. Here are the two I made last time.

The background pieces and handle are cut now, and so today's effort shouldn't take too long. When those are finished, I'll be at the "Quilter's Choice" section of my whiteboard. Since I just took time out to make a baby quilt, and since Project Quilting is under way, I'll skip that section this time around and start back at the beginning with a quilting project.

Next, I'll be quilting the Domestic Affairs quilt. It's been hanging out with Eliza for several weeks now. I'm pretty sure I know how to quilt this one, and so it'll be good to get it started. Starting puts one well on the way to finishing. (Deep thoughts, I know.)

When I finished up in the sewing room yesterday, I spent another hour or so on the Bicycles piece. I should finish this today. I've been working on it for almost a full month, and so I'm ready to move on to something else. Just the blue flowers and the "lace" at the top are unfinished. 

So, aside from grocery shopping, there's nothing else on today's agenda. When we get home, it'll be nothing but sewing. 

How's your day shaping up? Just now, I looked out the window. I see blue sky! Despite grocery shopping, it's going to be a good day here. I hope you have a good day planned for yourself too.

Scrappy

Good morning, my friends. It's foggy and bright outside. Probably we'll get some sunshine when the fog burns off. For now, it seems as if we're sitting inside a cloud. A new day starts. What's on tap for the day's activities? Well, let's just back up and see what happened yesterday. As you might guess, it was terribly exciting. Read that: "Boring." And that's my kind of excitement.

Sadie was my helper cat the day before, and so Smitty took a turn helping me finish off the new Duckworth quilt I'm calling "Land and Sea."

I only needed to add a few more strips to bring them to the 10-1/2 inch size I wanted. When they were trimmed, they looked like this.

That completes what will be the first of six rows for this quilt.

Smitty was completely worn out after that. He retired to his office in HR (He Rests).

Thankfully, Sadie showed up right on time for her shift. She helped me clean up my mess of green scraps.

I went back and forth, deciding what to do next. There are still a few days of work left on the "Bicycles and Lace" piece, but it seemed like a good time to trace out the next "short" project. I'll be doing the Catmint block which is a part of the Twilight Garden quilt pattern from Crabapple Hill Studios. It was released as a BOM a while back. I didn't want to make the whole quilt...actually, I did, but you know...UFO's. When this block was released, I decided to add it to my list of "short" embroidery projects.

Recently, I asked Mr. Random to choose my next project, and he just kept choosing the wrong thing. I finally stepped in and selected this block. Also, I picked out some floss colors from my vast embroidery floss stash.

And since I was kind of worn out on picking through scraps, I gave myself a little break by tracing out this stitchery.

The instructions would have had me color this with colored pencil. Since people often ask me about this, I'll say that (in my opinion), pencil gives a better result, but crayon is a less involved process. I've done both, and I prefer to use crayon, which is what I did here. (And if you click on those links, you can see how each is done.)

Okay, so that was pretty quick. Now it's ready for stitching, but it will be a few days before I start on it.

Instead, I took a look at the Lightframe quilt. I'm making this quilt one row at a time. Each row starts with six half square triangles. Those were pretty quick to make.

This is another scrappy quilt and, frankly, I was picked out when it came to picking through more scraps. I decided to stop for the day there. It was a good thing because tracing out the cat completely wore Sadie out. When I turned off the lights, she was snoring away on her sewing room quilt.

So, today I'll get to work making the next row for the Lightframe quilt. This is what I have so far:

Adding another row will put me over the halfway mark and on the downhill side.

If I can get that finished today, I'll make two more pieced blocks for the Girls' Getaway quilt. I've already stitched the centers for the next blocks.

Also, we've eaten our morning snack muffins, and so I'll make some more muffins this morning. Mike is often up very early in the morning, and the muffins tide him over until I can get up and join him for breakfast. Besides, I like the muffins too.

Okay, so we've already had our breakfast this morning. My next stop is for slow-stitching. I'm coming down the home stretch on my current project. Now that I've traced the next one, I want to finish the Bicycles and move along.

A Finish and a Start

Good morning, my friends. Yesterday's sunshine was short-lived. Within an hour of writing my post yesterday morning, we were back to rain. I still haven't made my way to the bottom of the driveway to see our new French drain. It's still too dark to tell what today's weather will hold, but it's looking promising. 

It was a good sewing day. I finished off the last of the Scrappy Plus blocks.

Here are all 20 blocks together. They just need to be sewn together, and I'll have a finished quilt top. There are a few projects in line ahead of it. Quilting and binding probably won't happen until sometime in 2026. (I feel as if I'm far into the future when I type out a year like that, but it's only just one year away. Sheesh. I'm old.)

Finishing all the blocks for this quilt was my goal for January's

and so I'll link up there when the party starts at the end of the month. And Sadie would like to take issue with my description of this as "finished." Clearly it is not finished. It's impurrtant to be purrcise with one's use of language.

But then she was overcome by a bad case of the adorables and she fell over. It happens.

So next up, I began the Duckworth quilt I've been threatening to start. Just now I typed "Duckworth Quilt" into my search bar. An AI-generated description came up, thus:

A Duckworth quilt is a wonky log cabin quilt made from scraps of fabric. The style is named after quilter Jo Anne Merrill-Duckworth, who is known for making scrappy quilts. 

 Here are some tips for making a Duckworth quilt: 

You can make a quilt top in a day.

Each block takes less than five minutes to make.

You can use a 6.5 inch ruler.

Duckworth quilts are a great way to use up scraps, even non-strippy ones.

 You can learn more about Duckworth quilts from these resources:

Pinterest: Find ideas for Duckworth quilts, including modified log cabin quilt blocks, crumb quilts, and rustic quilts 

YouTube: Watch a video tutorial on how to make a Duckworth quilt 

Podunk Pretties Blog: Read about the Duckworth style of quilting 

So I made up some rules for mine: My quilt top will consist of 10-1/2 inch blocks (unfinished) set five across and six down. My finished quilt will end up somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 x 60 inches. I'm not planning to add a border. I started with the centers. I cut five from my blue bin. I decided to use only scraps that contained blue and nothing else, however, a little green is acceptable. And I cut all five centers. Insofar as cutting goes, I'm using a ruler to get straight cuts, but I'm not measuring, and I'm making them intentionally wonky.

With the blues cut, I could turn my attention to the greens exclusively. For the greens, I'm cutting strips 1-3 inches wide. Other colors are permitted, but I'm only using scraps from my green bin. To start, I'm eyeballing the length and then sewing them to the center square. I'm chain-piecing them, which means I'm lining up the bottom of the strip with the bottom of the center square. For ease of chain-piecing, I'm keeping fabric scissors beside me and trimming off any excess at the top. When I had the first strip sewn on, they looked like this.

And then I just kept going until I'd completed the first round.

Then I started on the second round. It was late in the day by then. I cut the next strips to be sewn, but then just left them for today's sewing pleasure. I'm calling this project "Land and Sea."

The blocks will go together pretty fast. My plan is to make them five blocks per go-round. And that's all I know. 

So far, I'm kind of "meh" about these, but I'm determined to keep going and use up some of my greens and blues. I've seen plenty of finished Duckworth quilts, and each one has appealed to me, no matter the colorway. We'll just have to see where this takes me. And I figure it can always be a donation quilt if nobody else wants it.

Okay, so I don't have much on today's agenda. It's going to be a mostly sewing day. Hopefully I can get outside and take a look at that drain. How are you spending your Monday?

Two Down

Good morning, my friends. We're looking at a break in the rain for the next several days. We had rain off and on yesterday. There was enough dry weather for Mike and the other neighbor men to get out for some trenching and graveling a drainage area at the end of our driveway. It seems water runs downhill from our house into the neighbor's yard, and the deluge is eroding an embankment they want to preserve. After discussing it with the neighbors, it was decided to put a "French drain" at the end of our driveway. (Yeah...don't ask me. But if you're curious you can read all about it at that link I've given you.) It took several hours of his time yesterday. Mike was one of two "heavy equipment operators" (think tractor) needed to get the job done. I haven't actually seen it yet, and so I don't know what it looks like. Maybe I'll mosey on down there today and have a look.

So in other less industrial news, I'm making headway on the last bicycle for the Girls' Getaway quilt. There's probably still several days work in this, but I'm ready to move on to something else. I started this piece way back on December 17th, and so I've been working on it for nearly a full month. (It seems longer...probably because of the holidays.)

From there I donned my workout apparel and took a walk on the treadmill. When I came back upstairs, I found Smitty enjoying the view of his terrortory from his new geriatric kitty pole. He's taking to it little by little. I mentioned to Mike earlier, we'll probably need to move it to a new spot when the morning sunshine starts shining in this spring. Napping in the morning sunshine is pretty much his favorite thing to do. And please do not make any snide comments about his pawsterior. That is rude and hurtful.

After my shower, I headed into the sewing room and found him there ready to get to work.

Together, we sewed together the first of the remaining four Scrappy Plus blocks.

Sadie wanted to get in on the act after that. She loves this quilt. It's scrappy...just like her...and so she feels a kindred spirit with it.

But furrst...how exactly is this organized?

She helped me lay out and sew together the next block. When it was finished...DOH! Do you see it?

How about now? Oy. Sigh. Bummer. I hate it when I do something like this. There was supposed to be a dark orange triangle in that spot. I don't know how I missed that, but clearly I did.

[Insert ridiculously long period of time, including swearing, while I made this right.]

Let's just pretend that never happened, okay? Mum's the word.

Okay, now more than once someone has commented they think I've placed that dark blue in the wrong spot. Actually, no. I made it just as the pattern diagram showed it. When the first person asked, I checked the picture from the pattern, and it's shown the same way there. You can see for yourself in the image below. The quilt in the picture is more scrappy than mine, but it too has the dark blue in the same place.

And, nothing says I have to make it the same way as shown in the pattern, but I made the first blocks that way, and so I continued on for every one of them.

Okay, so I used a lot of my sewing time fixing that second block, and I'd kind of lost my motivation to sew by then. I decided to lay out the final two blocks for sewing today. When I laid them out, I found that I was short one square of the darkest gray fabric...

And one triangle, also in the darkest gray.

Hm...and I had an extra square and an extra triangle of white. Hm. Kinda makes you wonder if I substituted them somewhere along the way, doesn't it?

Well, if I did, it's going to stay that way. When I look at the blocks I've already made...

nothing really jumps out at me. You can see how the grays and white form diagonal lines, but I can't really see anything obviously out of place. In any case, even if I could find it, I'm not changing it. It's scrappy, and I'll fight anyone who tells me I have to change it. (Puts up dukes.) Anybody???? I thought not. Hmph. (Settles self down.)

Okay, so I cut the pieces I needed, and I'll finish sewing these two blocks together today.

When those are finished, I'll take a look at the Duckworth quilt project I mentioned in an earlier post. There are lots of examples on Pinterest. Mine will be done in blues and greens, which are currently the most overstuffed of my scrap bins. I'll be doing more scrap quilts in the coming months because, honestly, my scraps have become absolutely oppressive. It's time to find ways to pare them down some...as if that will ever happen.

Okay, so it's time to get on with my day. We've already had our blueberry oatmeal pancakes. Slow-stitching is next. Have a good day, Everybody! And, California, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for some progress on those terrible fires. Please stay safe, my friends.