Monday Meandering 3 - 28 -2022

Good Morning! (Or whatever time it is where you are.) I was gone all weekend and came home exhausted so I'm posting later than usual. More about that at the end of the blog. Now, I'll share my goals progress.  Yes there was some progress. 

3/21/22

✅Work on Easy Breezy Blocks — blocks sewn in rows

Make a few more Spider Web blocks— nothing done 

✅Make shoo fly blocks for SAHRR — some made 

✅Prep and work on wool ornaments — prepped but no sewing done 

✅Enter quilts for FCQ show in May 

Not too bad and being gone 3 days does make a dent in sewing time. 

The only quilt picture is of my SAHRR with some of the Shoo Fly blocks I've made.  Basically the appliqué and the shoo fly blocks are speculation.  I'm still trying to decide how to finish off this top. The left hand appliqué pieces are just pinned on.  I still need to figure the math on the Shoo Fly blocks.  Do I need to trim the white border to fit them or do something else to make them fit? Do I want them on all sides? Do I have enough of the 3 fabrics to make enough blocks to go all around?  Is this feathered star ever going to get done?? Hopefully I'll have answers to all those questions by the end of the week.    

Here's what I plan to do this week.  Sharon's coming up so I suspect I'll spend a lot more time in the studio. 

3/28/22

Clean up cutting table

Put borders on Stop Tossing

Sew rows together - Easy Breezy Blocks 

Make more Shoo Fly blocks for SAHRR

Make a few more Spider Web blocks

Put labels and hanging sleeves on 4 quilts

Um, dare I show you my cutting table that is number 1 on my to do list? Sure. Here it is from three sides. EEK - how did it get so bad? 

Left side. (Which normally is kept pretty cleared off. 

Center Front -- OH MY GOODNESS! 

Right Side. I've been trying to cut smaller pieces with my Accuquilt Go. But it is totally out of control.   

Hopefully by Thursday this whole area will look much, much better. 

Meanwhile, here's more about what Pat and I did this weekend. As some of you know Pat sings with The Virginians barbershop chorus.  This weekend was a combined Central and Southern Division competition for the Mid-Atlantic District. So we headed to Wilmington, DE on Friday morning so he could compete.  I usually don't go but agreed to attend this year.  And, what a great decision that was! 

Barbershop Harmony Society has expanded its membership to women and some chapters, like The Virginians, have embraced it. 

The competition for choruses and quartets was wonderful. Friday night was the prelims for 24 quartets. The first one blew me away as did many of them. I didn't see all of them as we had some other things going on -- like finding dinner.  

The chorus competition was held Saturday morning. I was able to see quite a few of the choruses.  Because it was a combination of divisions there were two first place choruses.  I'm proud to say The Virginians came in first in the Southern District.   Here they are during their performance. 

Pat's the second from the right on the floor.  I have nothing positive to say about their navy blue camp shirts.  I do know they were more comfortable than wearing more formal uniforms--think tuxes or suits. 

That evening the quartet finals were held for the 10 semifinal quartets.  Again, the quality and variety of singing was amazing.  One quartet did an admirable job including poking fun at themselves with a line they stuck in the song that said "we've sung literally all the songs we know..."  We hadn't had dinner before the 7 pm start so we scooted out after the last quartet and tried to get our leftovers from lunch heated up. 

The main downside of the whole weekend was the partying that went on after the competition.  I'm not sure every floor had the same problem but people were partying on our floor until 2 am.  To Barbershoppers that means singing.  Needless to say we were trying to sleep as some of the younger folks were having fun singing, chatting and at one point running up and down the hall. ARGH.  On the other hand, it is really great to see younger people joining the Barbershop Harmony Society.  We did get a little sleep then headed out early to get home before the traffic on I 95 backed up. I spent too much time in the afternoon snoozing although it didn't stop me from getting a good 8 hours sleep last night.

Back to my quilting blog... I'm going to link up with the following parties. (At least these parties only keep you up late if you choose.). 

Oh Scrap

MidWeek Makers

Design Wall Monday 

To Do Tuesday. 

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie 

Monday Meanderings 3 - 21 - 2022

 What a wonderful week I had!  Pat and I headed south to our beach home in Nags Head, NC for the week.  One evening we hit the beach for a moon rise. 

I packed projects, my trusty Featherweight, and supplies. I was able to make progress on the Stop Tossing Mystery.  I'll add the borders sometime in the next week or two. I also made quite a few more Spice Web and Happy Blocks. Let's see how I did on my goals list.

3/14/22

✅Work on Stop Tossing mystery quilt

✅Make more Red Spider Web blocks 

✅Make 7 more Easy Breezy blocks 

Sash the Easy Breezy blocks

✅Make March block from Sherri McConnell’s BOM

It was a successful week of sewing.  And what do I plan to do this coming week? 

3/21/22

Work on Easy Breezy Blocks

Make a few more Spider Web blocks 

Make shoo fly blocks for SAHRR 

Prep and work on wool ornament

Send quilt show entries to FCQ

I decided to change what I plan to do with the Easy Breezy blocks.  I laid them all out on my design wall again.  Do you have a favorite quilter to consult with when trying to decide what to do with a project?  My consultant is my friend Sharon.  We don't live near each other anymore but we send pictures back and forth when we need some ideas.  Here's what we decided.

Last week's blog shows this same group of blocks set up with sashing.  I started by laying out the blocks with sashing space. I figured out block placement at the same time. Then I used my camera to show them in grey scale.  It was pretty surprising how dark some of the blocks looked and even more the ones that appeared really light with little contrast. After a lot of back and forth we agreed it would look fine without sashing. It still needs some sorting but I was done for the day. I'll look at them tomorrow with fresher eyes. 

A highlight of my trip to the OBX was visiting a new quilt shop in Nags Head.  It's actually within walking distance of our house.   

The Rusty Crow is at milepost 11 (my best guess.) Some of you may recognize them -- they've been vending at quilt shows for many years, especially on the west coast.  

Shawn, the owner, was a great help when I was deciding which of her very cute ocean-related ornaments I wanted to buy for my grands this year.  

You can see the Shark here. Eventually I picked 4 kits.  I hope to start the first one this week. 

Here's a look inside the store: 

Wools on the tables and cottons on the shelves.  Evidently Shawn and her husband have been trying to get the building remodeled to better suit her products but it's hard to get work done in the Outer Banks these days. Now, she's hoping to start in the fall. 

This side had all sorts of patterns, Valdani threads, and notions. 

I may have already decided on my ornaments for 2023. 

If you visit the Outer Banks and you're interested in quilting and wool -- this is a must see shop.  I'm looking forward to visiting again on our next trip to Nags Head. 

Here are the details on the shop. 

The Rusty Crow

111 W. Seachase Drive

Nags Head, NC 

Web Address:  

https://www.rustycrow.com

On to the Linky parties I support. Please take some time to check them out and see what's new with quilters across the Internet. 

Oh Scrap

Monday Making

Design Wall Monday 

To Do Tuesday 

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie 

Monday Meanderings 3 - 14 - 2022

We are almost half way through March and I'm trying to figure out where the first two weeks went to!  I know I got things done but wow!  The time sped by.  It is time to share my Goals list from last week.  It was not a great week. 

3/7/22

✅Quilt customer quilt

✅Quilt and bind Marine Looking Glass -- I need to hand stitch the binding down still. 

Make labels & sleeves for 3 quilts going to the Faithful Circle Quilters show

Make 7 more Easy Breezy blocks 

Make March block from Sherri McConnell’s BOM

ARGH!  How did this happen?  I only succeeded with 2 of 5 goals? Hum, could it be the book I was reading?  I got really into it so I let the sewing get sidetracked a bit.  In case you are wondering which book grabbed my attention it was A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd. It was identified as being fiction, mystery, thriller, and historical fiction.  I was all for it except thriller.  I don't like tense books.  But Pat had read it and thought I might like it.  Eventually, I checked it out and you know what I did... read way too much each day and finished it in a day and a half.  There were some tense moments but not that bad.  The story line is about a WW I nurse who had promised to take a message for a dying soldier to his brother.  I'll leave it at that but it did grab my interest from the beginning. 

Obviously, I let the last 3 items go for various reasons.  But, guess what? You'll see them below for this week's goals. Will I buckle down and get these all done? Or? 

3/14/22

Work on Stop Tossing mystery quilt

Make more Red Spider Web blocks 

Make 7 more Easy Breezy blocks 

Sash the Easy Breezy blocks

Make March block from Sherri McConnell’s BOM 

I was in a quandary last week. I had a group of Easy Breezy blocks that I wanted to get into a quilt rather than just holding on to the blocks any longer.  I quickly realized I needed to figure out some sashing and make more blocks.  Do you audition fabrics for your quilts?  Here's what I did. 

Sashing I -- light grey on the left and darker grey on right. Meh - didn't do anything for me. 

Sashing II -- From left to right - light grey, blue & light green. Hum.

Sashing III --  From L to R - light grey, lighter blue, & blue. for some reason I like the light blue. It seems to brighten up the blocks.  

I imagine before I cut into my nice light blue fabric and after I've made the rest of the Easy Breezy blocks I'll lay them out again to make sure the light blue goes with all the colors.  Looks like I used a lot of yellow in the blocks. I definitely need to spread all the blocks out and see what it looks like. 

Off on another tangent -- remember above and I said we're half way through March.  I haven't mentioned my stash enhancing statistics. (Not that I really want or need to enhance my stash!) But here are the gory details. 

2022	Fabric In Month	Fabric In Year	Fabric Out  Month	Fabric Out Year	Total In or Out Year
Feb	27.00	36.5	12.50	20.75	-15.75

Yep, I went wild buying fabric. I have been trying to finish some of the tops I have hanging in the quilt closet.  If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember my trip to the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Show in February.  Yep that one where I bought 4 yards of wide back and 8 yards of regular fabric.  And, I bought a really cool background fabric for the Stop Tossing mystery.  When I figured the square inches of the wide backs and then converted it back into yardage and added the rest -- it was about 27 yards. (Ok, there were some fat quarters and scraps from my daughter for the red and white spider webs too.) On the other hand, I did finish two quilts.  And for a look to the future I've already quilted 2 quilts in March.  So hopefully it won't be too long before I have used more fabric than I've purchased.  

It seems to me I've been typing way more than normal.  Funny that. I didn't think I had any thing to post about today.  Anyway, it's time to get on with the day (yep, I'm even doing this later than usual!) You know the routine.  Please check out these Linky parties.  You never know when something will catch your eye and you'll have a perfect project for some special fabric in your stash. 

Oh Scrap

Monday Meanderings

Design Wall Monday 

To Do Tuesday 

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie 

A Finish Is Coming

 ... But not yet!  I've finished another quilt on Ruthie, the long arm, today.  It won't be finished for a couple of more days but it is definitely in the works.  Here's a sneak peek.  

The quilting design is called Sally by the Seashore by My Creative Stitches.  It's another really involved design.  On this approximately 50" quilt it took more than 25 minutes.  There's lots of backstitching and it really fills the area.  It is perfect for this quilt though. 

I've recently gotten a new laptop -- a MacBook Pro.  My old laptop was about 9 years old and could hardly do anything anymore. It's taking me forever to figure every thing out.  My latest discovery was "Markup" in the Photo application.  I was using a really old watermarking app on the old computer and I couldn't find anything that seemed reasonable to me in the Apple App Store.  Then I did a search on marking up photos. Well, what do you know?  There was a fairly easy way to add text to photos.  So that's how I got my blog info on the photo above. 

I did download a free photo collage maker so I may try to use that every once in a while.  It's always fun to stretch the brain.  

Have you found Wordle yet?  I am a big fan of word games and this one really keeps the brain working.  It is all the rage among my friends of Facebook. The premise is you have 5 tries to guess a 5 letter word.  You type in a word and Wordle lets you know if it isn't in the word, it's in the word but not in the right place or whether it's in the word and in the correct position.  Sometimes I do well (3 tries) sometimes it's 6.  I almost always get it in the end.  Here's the results of today's challenge.

Wordle 265 4/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I got this one in 4 tries.  What helps is seeing the listing of letters where it shows which ones are not in the word as you keep trying.  I haven't figured out the best strategy yet but I will at some point.  

I'm keeping this short(ish) tonight.  I've been busy most of the day.  There's snow in the forecast tomorrow -- I hope it isn't the model that is calling for 9".  If there's that much snow we might lose power and I need to sew the binding on Marine Looking Glass tomorrow. 

I'm linking up with the following great parties: 

Needle and Thread Thursday 

Finished or Not Friday 

Beauties Pageant 

You know the drill:  Spend some time checking out these great linky parties.  You can get more ideas -- new quilts, new fabrics and other fun things.  

I'm ready to call it a night -- and then go read for a bit. Hopefully snow won't be falling in the morning. 

Happy Quilting All  -- Bonnie 

Monday Meanderings 3 - 7 - 202

What a busy week this has been for me.  I shouldn't have been surprised since I gave myself 7 items on my to do list which is way more than the 4 or 5 I usually give myself.  The best news from my point of view is I actually made some progress on all of the goals.  Shocking, but I was highly motivated this week.  

2/28/2022

✅Make more red Spider blocks, Ombre blocks  

✅Bind Grape quilt -- you can go here to see the finished quilt

✅Cut pieces for “cupcake” blocks — Some are done more to do

✅Finish sewing Looking Glass quilt together - done, make backing fabric — in process 

✅Work on SAHRR - a little done but this is going to the back burner for now

✅Start on March’s UFO Challenge Quilt - Easy Breezy blocks to top 

✅Making backing for the little dog quilt, load and quilt 

I pulled out the Easy Breezy blocks. I had 35 done and want to lay them out in a 6 x 7 grid.  So first up is make 7 more blocks. 

I decided to see how a churn dash block will look with my SAHRR feathered star.  I like my sample block so eventually I'll get enough made to make another full border. But I have too many things to do that have deadlines to finish it now. Hopefully I won't bury it again. 

The little dog quilt has been quilted.  Eventually I'll trim and bind it but not this week. 

Here's what's up this coming week

3/7/2022

Quilt customer quilt

Quilt and bind Marine Looking Glass 

Make labels & sleeves for 3 quilts going to the Faithful Circle Quilters show

Make 7 more Easy Breezy blocks; make blocks for FCQ Equilter this month

Make March block from Sherri McConnell’s BOM

I finally took a picture of the two wide back fabrics I bought at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt show.  The white will be used to piece with. (I never put white on the back of a quilt.  Do you?) The fun rainbow circles is going to be used on 2 rainbow scrap challenge tops and one top I made in rainbow colors.  I don't know when I'll get to them but hopefully at least one this month. 

When I was watering my plants this month I noticed one lone flower on my Christmas Cactus.  What a surprise.  It bloomed profusely between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I figured it was done for awhile. When I took this picture I notice one other very early bud and 3 even earlier buds. I may have a beautiful display in a few weeks.  Maybe I should have taken this photo from a different angle so you can see how big this bloom is. 

I'll try to remember to take more pictures if it decides to give me more blooms. As much as I like to keep up my indoors plant I don't do much outdoors. I'd like to but the heat of our summers just takes too much out of me. (Or at least that's my excuse!) 

I'm ready to call it a night.  So, please remember to go to one of these Linky parties to access a lot of wonderful quilt blogs.  It so fun to surf the web to see what people are up to. 

Oh Scrap

Monday Making

Design Wall Monday

To Do Tuesday 

One last bit of info. I finally used up my first spool of thread this year.  Since I switched to using a cone of thread for most of my piecing I haven't been using as many spools.  Thanks to needing navy blue thread for the Marine Looking Glass border I was able to use a large spool up. Whoop! 

Have quilting all!  Bonnie (ready to go read a book and get some sleep.) 

It's a Finish

Having bought enough backing fabric to finish 5 quilts last week I'm working to get as many of them done as I can over the next month or two.  Here's the first one I've finished with my backing purchases at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Show.   

I started this Stack N Whack quilt at a guild class in 2016.  I believe I finished the top in the last 2 or 3 years but darn if I remember exactly when. It is from the book by Bethany Reynolds called Magic Stack N Whack. 

If you don't know the method all of the center motifs came from the same fabric as the border.  You buy a LOT of fabric so you can carefully align the designs exactly on top of each other (if I remember correctly, 8 layers of fabric!) Then you carefully cut the triangles from all 8 layers at once. The motifs look different because of where they were cut in the fabric. 

Hum, the grass goes better with the backing than the front of the quilt.  Honestly, there is a little of the duller green in the grape fabric it just isn't obvious because I chose the brighter green for the quilt. (Looking at the above picture the purple really isn't the right color either. It is what I would call aubergine -- or think of a nice burgundy wine...) 

How about a close up of the quilting? 

This quilting design is called Grapevine by My Creative Stitches.  I bought the design long before I was ready to quilt it.  But when I started last weekend I was all for using another pattern.  This was going to take forever.  (To me forever is over 15 minutes a row or so. This was over 30 minutes.) Ruthie, the long arm, is working really well these days so  I was able to spend the 30 minutes piecing.  Does that count as doing 2 things at once? We did 3 rows on Saturday and 3 on Sunday. Binding got done on Monday. Boom! It was done. 

You can see how I captured a bit of the purple grapes along with some of the pink grapes in this block.

This motif captured more of the red grapes and some leaves with just the little circle of purple in the middle.  It was fun picking where I was going to  cut the fabric and how they looked when sewn together. 

And here are four more motifs close up.  None of my 9 blocks looked the same. On Monday I shared the very beginning quilting here. It turns out  you can't see the quilting in the motifs nor in the border. But it does show wonderfully in the solid green fabric.  I used Omni thread in a light olive green. You can't see the quilting on the back that well either. 

I'll end my quilt love fest with this quilt by sharing the photo I took of the quilt hanging on the back deck. Talk about a photo going rogue! Or maybe just wrong.  The original has a beautiful blue sky, the quilt doesn't look bright green and... wait that roof beside the house on the right doesn't look like a mountain.  I have no idea where this photo went wrong.  I took it just before I took all the photos except the very first one.  Oh well.  At least this gives a better idea of the size. It is 58" x 58". 

I'm linking up to my regular parties.  Please spend some time visiting these link up parties so you can do some serious blog surfing this weekend! 

Needle and Thread Thursday

Finished or Not Friday

Beauties Pageant 

This allowed me to check one item on my to do list off this week.  I've got some more work to do but I am making a nice dent in the list. 

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie