odds and ends

Since I've finished my "assignments" for the month, I don't have anything specific to report, but I have been sewing!

First, on Monday I finally got it together and mailed off the two quilts I made plus a few my mom made for the Share the Love quilt donations for A Doll Like Me.  You've seen one of the quilts in finished form, but I'm just going to share both again.  I love them both so much!

The fish quilt is about 24x24 and the sunshine quilt is about 22x24.  I think.  Probably.  They're for 18" dolls, so should be big enough to wrap them up.

I didn't take photos of the quilts my mom sent.  We shared a box, and I did the sending, but photos?  Yeah.  Probably should have.  Oh well.  Far too late now!

But a strange thing happened with the shipping.  I contacted the gal running the project and she gave me the address of A Doll Like Me.  It was a PO Box.  No big deal.  I plugged that into the UPS website (I was shipping from work - using MY account thankyouverymuch - because we have a daily pickup and doing this on my lunch was far easier than any other option) and no error or warning messages came up.  Good to go.  Hit send!  Then I started wondering...it's a PO Box.  That's Post Office.  Will UPS just deliver to a post office?  So I googled.  Turns out they "can't" but will attempt to find an actual address.  So they did.  I got notifications the day it was delivered that they had found the problem (only took 2 days...) and resolved it!  But they found an actual street address.  Probably I could have googled the name of the gal I was given and gotten the same result, but I think there was a reason she had a PO Box!  I just hope she doesn't think I was being creepy.  I truly did NOT go looking for her personal info.  And I hope the box actually made it (UPS says it was left on the front porch).  How terrible would that be if it was delivered to a cranky old fart who just threw my (and my mom's) quilts away?!  But I can't worry about that now.

With these squirrels out of the way, I decided that last weekend I would quilt Philip's quilt.  I hadn't made a decision, but figured having it done would allow the decision to be made either way and not because of a lack of finishing.

It took a while and far more bobbin winding than I wanted (I just ordered 20 longarm bobbins...how is it that only 2 were empty?!), but I got it finished.  I went with an overall design, but I think it suits the quilt...well, a wedding quilt...

This photo shows the colors pretty well.  The next whole-quilt shot does not.  It's been beautiful and sunny here for about a week.  Still cold, but I'll take the sun and cooler temps over snow any day!

But that means tree shadows on my quilt photos.  At least it wasn't ridiculously windy...

It's about 76x84 or something.  I don't remember what the pattern said.  And I'm too lazy to go look.  It's called "Dream Weaver" by Missouri Star Quilt Company.  There's a nice tutorial how to make the blocks.  Which aren't hard, but Jenny did discover a little trick with keeping stuff going the right way since there is some fussiness with pieces.

But once it was done (binding and all!) on Wednesday, I had to start thinking really hard about whether I was going to give this quilt or not.  I thought about what you all had said and wished I didn't have this silly timeline.  In the end, I decided to wait.  I truly don't think I'll be invited to the wedding, but if I am, I can give the quilt.  And if not, I suppose it will have to become Not Philip's Quilt at some point.  Until then, we wait.  The wedding is in 3 months, so I expect in about 2 I'll know for sure.

This past weekend, my guild also had our annual quilt show.  No photos...sorry...  I didn't enter anything.  That's a whole other story, but it's okay.  We had a lot of nice quilts and a nice show.  It sounds like the turnout was quite good, too, so the folks doing the advertising did a good job.  We have tables set up around the room for members to work on projects while the show is going on.  While I've heard mixed reviews of visitors, generally it seems folks like to see us hard at work.  (or giggling...but no one at MY table was giggling...)  I decided I'd take my tiny stars because they're easy and I had a lot of pieces cut and ready to go.  And we share tables and cram ourselves into much less space than we normally would, so this being a smaller-scale project, I could easily share a table.  100 little baggies of sets of 8 squares went with me.  I sewed the first point for every fabric (4 sets of points per block) I took.  I also pressed them.  And they were turning the lights out on me as I was finishing.

No photos of that, but last night, I worked on trimming the wonky sewn points back into squares so I can wonky sew the second point onto all the colors...

They're all tidy in this box, and it's hard to believe there's 100 blocks (plus extra background squares) in this box, but there are!

This will definitely help my efforts.  I have probably 200 made already, but needing over 1000, this is gonna take a while.  But for the most part, I'm having fun doing it and if I try to push it and rush it, I'm going to hate it.  So I'm taking my time.  (The times I'm not having fun are the times when I trim the background instead of the color fabric.  Or when I sew something wrong and have to unsew it.  But who likes that stuff?)

Tonight the hubby has taken two nephews to see Pacific Rim.  When he left, I went into frenzy mode and cleaned the house.  Gabby, aka Spazarella, likes to destroy paper.  Tear it to shreds with her little, sharp, evil kitten teeth.  I have never seen a cat this determined to shred paper.  So there were bits everywhere.  (And I'm sure she'll make more tonight.)  And then there's the usual - dishes, laundry, bathroom - they all got done, too.  The house will be tidy for the weekend and now I can sew without feeling too guilty.

So what will I do tonight?  Probably tiny stars.  Unless I end up just watching something on Netflix.  Probably sewing, as I look at the clock and realize the movie started 2 hours ago!  But I have found that I can watch some stuff on my phone, using Netflix and headphones, while sewing.  I have to choose more mindless stuff (I've been cruising through "The Office" lately and find that easy enough to follow without really watching), but it's a nice alternative to music sometimes.  (Particularly when Pandora has a bad day and thinks Taylor Swift should be played on the Green Day station...  For anyone who doesn't know who those folks are...Taylor Swift is a young, female pop star, Green Day are punk rockers who swear a lot.  I'm not much of a Taylor Swift fan.)

And now it's off to finish folding the laundry and wait for the hubby.  He mentioned something about bringing home a late dinner.  He's been in the big city south of here with the kids, so I wonder if he'll bring something we can't get locally?

Happy quilting,

Katie

11-19-2019: Philip's Quilt is Not Philip's Quilt.  The wedding invitation never came (not a surprise) and the quilt was instead donated to Saved By Zade, a cat rescue organization, to be used as a fundraiser.  See post from 11-19-2019 for more details.

...it happened again...and again...

One would think that with 5 cats in the house, squirrels would be scarce.

Nope.

While I'm allowing Philip's quilt to rest a bit and decide if it needs borders and what those might be, I started thinking about what else I could work on until the new Rainbow Scrap Challenge color and the new UFO number are announced.

I could work ahead.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Nope.

I had read about a doll quilt project going on earlier in the month, but it didn't grab my attention too much.  Last weekend?  It slapped me in the face.  I started looking deeper and liked what I read.  Mostly.  Why?  Well, there's a wonderful woman who makes dolls for kids - dolls just like them.  If the child has a big scar, the doll does too.  If the child is missing a limb, the doll is too.  I think this is an amazing idea.  The donated quilts will be paired with the dolls.  Another fantastic idea.  The part that held me back just a little was that the gal making the dolls charges for them.  Now don't get me wrong, I don't think she shouldn't be paid for what she does.  And when I read more about it, this is her business, not a hobby, and she's open about it and that made me feel much better.  So a squirrel decided I needed to make a quilt.

I went to Pinterest.  That vast space that wastes way too much of my time.  But provides some pretty good ideas, too.  I saw this quilt, previously pinned, and knew it was IT.

There wasn't a pattern, but it was far too large anyways, so I had to make it up as I went along.

As I went to pull out my blue stash to choose fabrics, I saw the stack of solids left over from my paint chip challenge project.  I'm not much of a solids gal (I like prints that read as solids, so you get the best of both worlds!), but they seemed to be screaming that they were IT for this project.  And since I don't use solids much, win-win!

I started cutting the lightest, using it all.  Then the next lightest, using it all.  Then the next and used it all.  Fill in with the fourth lightest (middle color for the challenge) and I have all 80 squares I need.

I had to sew carefully, as those squares are all carefully placed to not be touchy-touchy with the same color.  Good thing I've done this before!

I knew I wanted to do straight-line quilting to hold things together, but there's that sun...  (But I already knew what fabric that sun would be!)  How about machine applique that OVER the already-quilted top?  Sounds like I'm going to hear from the quilt police, but bring it on!

I can't believe I did this in about 4 hours.  Even the binding.

But I had help with the binding...

Thank you, Gabby-don't-eat-the-pins!  (I have extra holes in my skin now, too.)

What does it look like?

It's about 20"x25".

(and actually not skinnier at the bottom than the top...I just can't get the hang of taking actually square photos with my camera...)

I absolutely love it.  I can't wait to send it off.

But then, as I was sewing down the binding, I remembered the stack of blue squares I'd cut for the blue squirrel project - the ones that should have been 6" instead of 3"?

What if I lay those out in a gradient-like pattern?

And if I turn the photo black-and-white, I can see how I did, right?

(this is not the first layout, as it took a few tries, but I think I've got it!)

Time for bed!

But I tossed and turned in bed last night, thinking that this wasn't quite large enough.  It will finish about 18" square and the call is for about 22-24", as the dolls are 18" dolls.

What if I put a darker border on two sides and a lighter border on the other two?  Miter the corners where the different colors meet?

Maybe applique some orange fish on there, using the same technique as the sun?  And maybe some seaweed?

Today, I went back to the sewing room and decided I did not want that.  Not exactly.  I still wanted fish.  What about pieced fish?  One in each row will make the quilt wider at least...

Fish #1.  And the blue?  I grabbed that out of my scrap bin to see what size squares I needed for the lost corner technique.  Well, why not just use them?

I ensmallenated the pattern from The Objects of Design, as I wanted the fish to be 3" tall finished.  I hope Molly approves...

So I still have to figure out how to make the quilt taller...and sew the remaining 5 fish...and decide if I still want seaweed...and decide on a new layout with fish because their backgrounds and bodies are varying shades of blue and orange, respectively...and figure out how to quilt it now that I've changed a whole bunch of stuff...

But hey, this is a happy squirrel.  And I hope this one will be boy-worthy.  (Though the sunshine quilt is probably boy-worthy, even with a funky back.  I used leftovers from Sarah's quilt back.)

I'd better go get sewing.  The hubby has promised he'll heat up lasagna for dinner, but he's promised that four times in the last hour and a half.  I'm starting to wonder if the couch has assimilated his body and he can't get out?  He's not hollering though, so I guess he's enjoying it?

Happy quilting,

Katie

PS I sucked my mom AND my aunt into this project, too!