Next Steps

Good morning my friends. My morning got off to a slow start yesterday. For one thing, I slept in until 7:00 a.m. I'm an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of person. Generally, I'm up and at 'em during the 5:00 hour, and so losing two hours out of my morning is a lot. I didn't even get dressed until shortly before noon. Sadie was busy outside. She was appalled at the level of sloth.

And that's not the worst of it. Just look at those dirty windows! (Yeah...window washer guy comes in a couple of weeks, and not a minute too soon.) Well. When I saw her face, I knew it was time to get going. 

Mike was hard at work outside, as he has been all week. He's still working on sweeping up, picking up, cutting off, blowing away, and...as always...fixing stuff. Yesterday, he found an abandoned bird's nest in our star magnolia, just off our deck. It probably belonged to a finch-type bird at some point.

Taking a walk around, I noticed the stargazer lily has five flowers now. There are still more buds.

To its left, we're seeing more buds on the echinacea.

The first cherry tomatoes have appeared, and there are more flowers. It's only just getting started.

The purple hydrangea is putting out more flowers. It's always a treat when this begins to bloom in earnest.

Back inside, I went to work sewing the binding on the Tiny Hearts quilt. It's a finish now. It ends up at 13 x 15 inches, and it's already hanging on the wall of my office/quilting room.

Here's how it looks from the back. Both those fabrics have been in my stash a long time, and so I'm glad to find a way to use them.

Okay, so let's take a look at what's next. Before I go on, I should say I'm seriously considering taking a picture of my white board, erasing the whole thing, cleaning it, and then starting over. It's been erased and written on for so many years, there's a lot of stray marks dirtying the surface. In any case, here's my list of WIPs. These are quilts that I'm working on one or two blocks at a time, or one row at a time...it depends on the quilt. The second and third ones on this list are new projects.

I had in mind to start with the Girls' Getaway blocks, but I was also curious about the two new projects. Both will be scrappy quilts. I'd already decided to make the "Scrappy Plus" quilt. As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe I downloaded this pattern for free at some point, but I can't find the link any more. If you're interested,  you can find a download for it right here.

I decided to go ahead and pull fabrics for this. The "pluses" will be done in four different colors, each color from the same fabric. I was to choose a dark, medium, and light of red, orange, green, and blue. The background is done in grays and whites. I pulled the two grays you see there in the upper right corner of the image below, but I'm going to work from my gray and white scrap bins instead. I should have enough scraps to make the whole quilt. If not, I have plenty of yardage as well. 

I'll do all the cutting for this quilt first, which seems a formidable undertaking. The blocks are fairly complicated to sew together, and having the cutting done ahead will be the best strategy. There will be 20 blocks before it's all said and done.

Then, I saw this quilt on Pinterest a few days ago. It's called "Lightframe." The pattern is available right here, but honestly, I think I can figure this out without a pattern. I'm going to give it a whirl.

The only two consistent fabrics in the quilt are the green and the white, and so I pulled two fabrics for those half-square triangles. The rest is sort of a half log cabin, and I'll do that with scraps from my stash. It'll be good to put my scrap bins to work. Frankly, all they do is sit around lazily collecting fabric. By the way...there is a white fabric to the right of that green. On my screen, it blends into the background and disappears.

Okay, and so I spent about an hour or more on all of that. Let's get back to my original task, which was to figure out which two blocks I'm making for the Girls' Getaway quilt, and then choose some fabrics for that. After such a long absence from this project, it took me a while to get my bearings and remember what I was doing when I left it the last time. Eventually, I was able to figure out that I need to make two blocks like the one pictured below.

When I'm making a quilt from a pattern, I usually try to choose fabrics similar to those pictured. The green stripe was easy. The other two were harder. I like the blue in the middle, but I'm still not sure about the one on the right. I'd prefer something floral and so I'll probably pick something else before I start on this. I've been doing some digging, though, and I'm not finding anything I like better.

So that was all the "sewing" I did yesterday. Even no sewing can still be seen as sewing. 

And after her scolding me about my laziness during the morning, I found Sadie and her partner in crime snoozed out upstairs. They were no help at all yesterday. 

The only other sewing-related thing to happen yesterday is that the backing fabric arrived for the Barnyard quilt. I'm happy with this choice. I'll need to sew one long seam to make a back for the quilt.

Today we have some errands to run in town. When we get home, I'm going to make up some sandwich mix and a salad for tonight's dinner. The rest of the day will be devoted to sewing, and I'll get a start on those two blocks for the Girls' Getaway. We're looking at a nice day of weather. I hope y'all have a good day ahead of you too.