Two Comfort Quilt Finishes

     I started this week busily quilting to finish up some projects and I have.  I finished the quilting on this comfort quilt. 

The pieced blocks were made from bonus HSTs adopted years ago. I still have a few I will give away or stuff in dog beds. I quilted the plain blocks using a template to mark quilting guide lines and a gold color thread. The pieced blocks are meandered with a variegated light green thread.  For the setting triangles I stitched half a feather motif. Here is a closeup of the quilting.

   Next I finished a comfort quilt using Pat Sloan’s free Oh My Stars pattern.

 I did change the size of the units from 4.5” finished to 6” finished for a little larger size quilt. For the binding I did not have enough of one fabric I wanted to use so decided to use a scrappy binding. Here is a closeup. 

Both of these quilts will go to church quilt group for our quilt ministry.  Now I hope to get the binding on my 4 patch swirl quilt for a another finish so I can tackle another UFO.

Hope you take time to enjoy some sewing or quilting. 

Another Week of Grandma Camp

     I managed to spend some quilting time Sunday afternoon.  The center is all quilted. The rest will wait until next week.

     The rest of the week has been all about fun time with my granddaughters.  I pick them up in the mornings for the day of crafting, baking and sewing plus a little time at the park and the pool.  We have baked blueberry muffins and a blueberry pie with blueberries from my bushes.  We baked cupcakes for their mom’s birthday and they made the icing and decorated them.

     The girls worked on animal sculptures out of air dry clay.  The structure of the body was formed from Styrofoam eggs and skewer sticks.  Here is an in-progress photo.

Here they are with them finished.

     They decorated china cups and plates with glass markers as presents for parents.  The 7 year old sewed a simple placemat turned pillowcase style so no binding and machine quilted it with the walking foot.  The 11 year old sewed a set of 4 coasters plus a matching mug rug.

     The least exciting thing was for the girls to spend time on summer work packets because school starts for them August 1^st.  My how the summer has flown by.

Hope you take time to enjoy some sewing or quilting. 

Excited to be Almost Finished

* update  -totally finished

There are 63 swirl blocks that I started in 2007 so this is a long time UFO.  I started out trying to quilt the floral pattern and did a good job.  Here is a close-up of the quilting on one swirl block.

Then I got tired and frustrated with trying to figure out how to move around in the block (about 30 different ways) to end up where I wanted in order to move to the next without breaking thread so did not do a pleasing job.  I am excited that it is trimmed and ready for binding.

    When I had to take a break from quilting, I pulled out a few more UFOs to work on. About 2012 I took a workshop from Deb Karasik and only paper-pieced one wedge.  Now I at least have 4 done.

 

I chose a different color palette but hope one day it will get finished.  Her pattern is called “Inner Light”.  

    I don’t need another project to work on but adopted a UFO from a guild member.  This week I also pieced 4 quarter units and cut more units and made some progress on this project.  

Both of these are tedious paper-piecing projects so I can only do a little at a time before I need a change.

Hope you enjoy some time sewing or quilting.   

Variety of Small Projects

      Last week I worked on a wide variety of projects, not all quilting.  I did take time to make 2 mug rugs and put them in the mail with birthday wishes. 

I went through a box of paper-pieced sample blocks.  I pulled out 2, quilted them and made them into pockets on purchased tote bags. 

                    

      In cleaning out and sorting fabric scraps I found a bag of bonus half square triangle blocks. I spent time pressing and decided to use some of them for Bonnie Hunter’s newest leader/ender challenge.

                            You can find out about it here.  

The worst part or least enjoyable was trimming the small HSTs down to 1 ½ inches.  My shoo fly blocks will finish at 4 inches.  I have several block sets ready for sewing but have many more HST units that need trimming.

     My church requested donations of baby items so Joan and I gathered suitable fabric and I made 3 receiving blankets,

5 burp cloths from cloth diapers,

and 2 double layer fleece blankets.

    Saturday a friend and I walked a new section of the local riverwalk park.  A talented person used several fallen trees for chainsaw sculptures. 

        

  They are so fitting for the setting.

Hope you get out and enjoy nature or stay cool inside with some time sewing or quilting.