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.)

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?