Snowflakes and Snow

As I mentioned yesterday, it was to be an NBS day, and I put my heart and soul into it. Besides, I needed to take advantage of that extra hour, didn't I? Can you think of a better way to use it? We even had leftovers for dinner, so I could avoid cooking. It was the most glorious day sewing, sewing, and more sewing, and an extra hour to boot. 

There were five more quilt blocks to finish on the Snowflakes quilt. There was one pieced snowflake remaining, and then four stitched snowflakes. I started with this one:

These last snowflakes were a bit of a challenge when it came to figuring out where to stitch in the middle. I ended up curving around those little French knot motifs in the middle. Here's how that looks from the back. 

Moving on to the next one, this one ended up the fanciest of the lot when it came to quilting. 

Here's how that looks from the back:

I studied this next one for a long time before deciding where to stitch it. I ended up putting the needle right down in the point of those little diamond motifs in the middle. It's the only one where I took a single stitch over the embroidery motif at each little diamond. It's hard to see in this picture.

Here's how it looks from the back. It's one of the smaller ones, but it will work from a functional standpoint.

Finally, this last snowflake. If I'd stitched this in the colors on the pattern, the aqua dots would have been red, and the aqua leaves would have been green. They're holly berries. That whole thing was lost on me until I'd finished the block. In any case, I didn't want to use red on my piece. Mine are all blues, aquas, silver and gold.

This is the one snowflake that I stitched making two rounds around the center to get the shape you see below.

Okay, so that was all the quilting I was planning for the day. It was time to move into the sewing room and start catching up on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks. I'd already laid out August's orange blocks. Thankfully, my sewing cat was johnny-on-the-spot to help.

While I was piecing them together, he engaged in the tail swipe method of randomizing the pieces. Very helpful.

August's orange blocks finished up like this:

It was nearing lunch time by then, but I took time to lay out September's light blue blocks.

When I came back after lunch, I sewed those together.

Before finishing for the day, I laid out October's light green blocks.

That's where I'll start when I finish my day's quilting assignment. Today's quilting assignment is to quilt the setting triangles. I know what I want to do, if I can pull it off. When those are finished, I might do one of the inner borders, or I might put that off until tomorrow. It all depends on how well I'm able to pull off the quilting for the setting triangles. I'll either be motivated to continue, or I might be motivated to slit my own throat. One never knows when free motion quilting is involved. 

As for the "rainbow" blocks. When October's light greens are finished, I'll need two more to complete all the blocks for the quilt I'm making. There is no color for November, but I'm leaning toward lavender. When it's finished the blocks will be set on point. If you click here, you'll see how it will look when it's finished. The top quilt on Rita's blog is from the same pattern, although hers is done in different colors. I'll probably do something different for the borders.

Okay, so it's Monday, and there's one housekeeping chore on the list for today. My day's goals are to quilt the setting triangles on the Snowflakes quilt, and then to finish up the "rainbow" blocks. If I can finish those, I'll get a start on sewing together the Heartland Barns.

We got a little dusting of snow last night. You can see it there frosting the shrubs and grass.

We're expecting more snow tonight and temperatures into the 20's by Wednesday. It's cold for this time of year. Our weather doesn't usually turn that cold until nearer to Christmas. I'm hoping we don't get too much snow because we're getting our COVID boosters tomorrow. So it'll be a mostly sewing day, and a good day to stay inside and keep warm.