Circle of Life

There is so much exciting stuff going on in the quilting world that I jumped at the chance to join the newly formed Modern Quilt Guild (Central Illinois chapter). Our first challenge was to make a Circle of Geese block and turn it into a finished piece. You can find the free Piece by Number pattern here.

I made mine a circle of life (geese, after all, qualify as living!) and went dark to light in the circle, and then made borders that went light to dark on two sides, and dark to light on two others. The outer red isn't part of the quilt, but the white borders didn't show up on my white design wall!

My friend Mary made a tote from her geese block. The front is the basic block done in purple and teal batiks, but running out of fabric made her get creative on the block for the back -- look at the amazing star that forms in the center when you do it in a different fabric from the background. Wow! (Sorry about the poor lighting in the photo.)

I've been doing a lot of quilting and no blogging lately, so I'm starting with the most recent and will catch up in subsequent posts. Here's a Project Linus top I just finished -- it had been almost done for a couple of years and when I finally pulled it out, it took only an hour or so to finish it up. It's a Disappearing 9 Patch with a bear theme for a local summer camp for children with cancer.

Colorful Coins

I love scrappy, I love color, and I love using up odds and ends.

At one of our Project Linus worknights a few of us dug through our string bins and started sewing coin stacks by color. We got a few stacks done but then the project just sat waiting for almost a year.

Today I pulled out the stacks and finished them up, then reined in the colors with a dotted white.

It's so easy for coin stacks to get crooked and w-O-b-b-L-y, so I like to sew small chunks, trim to size, and then add the trimmed stacks to each other. My gridded ironing board is one of my favorite sewing tools--it's so easy to see what's straight and what's not! Wonky is wonderful as a design element, but not so great as a construction flaw.

This is just the top, not yet quilted. I think I'll use a rainbow of strings in the binding to give a little line of color around the edge. I like this layout color-wise -- in many rainbow patterns the colors are offset by one in each row, which gives you a color diagonal. I offset these by two, which breaks up the color lines and keeps your eye moving around the quilt more.

Project Linus gets this quilt, and I hope it makes a child happy. It made me happy to make it! And I like it so much, I may make a version for myself.

A few things

I picked up some irresistible scraps from a big bin at a homewares store the last time I visited DD1 in Berkeley. Small pieces, big prints, no way I could think of to use them. How about fussy cutting a house for Victoria's donation quilt?

I hope to get another house made tomorrow.

Since I mentioned recently that I am into piano key borders, I thought I'd share a photo of a Project Linus quilt we made.

A guild member with an AccuCutter cut zillions of squares and strips from our bugs and critters fabric. Boy, what a time saver that is! Several people sewed the strips to make rail fence blocks and pieced the center of this quilt. The layout had been my idea, but I didn't like it at all when it was made! Eek! So I added the green border to give the eye a place to rest and used most of the rest of the strips as an outer border. I just love piano keys!

Today I got back to work on a quilt I started some time ago. I love the blue strata, but it seems like water to me and it's not a water quilt. I'm going to have to to make a landscape quilt before long! It's so hard to cut these big strata up, but I now have all the strata made and most of the squares cut. The quilt will also have some wonky log cabins, which I just got started on today.

It feels great to be finishing up some old projects -- they were really weighing me down. If you're feeling that way about your UFO's, you might want to read this post on the Happiness Project blog. I subscribe to the blog and belong to their Facebook group because the posts do help keep me focused on positive things.

Quilts!

Project Linus. I may have been neglecting my blogging, but I have not been neglecting my quilting. Tomorrow is Project Linus Make A Blanket Day and my car is loaded with 79 quilts/fleece blankets to deliver. And NO, I did NOT make them all myself!! My guild made some of them, and others were dropped off by various community groups.

But I did make lots of kits from my guild's donated fabrics. We had zillions of squares of all sizes, and we cut more. Here I tried to make a quilt for a child who loves pink.

I don't go for just grabbing any square and stitching it to the next, so I tried to lay out this quilt (limited by the squares I had available) to have lighter ones in the center. It's really fun to be forced to use only what's at hand.

And we're always looking for something simple but different so quilters of all skill levels can sew during our worknights, and I thought disappearing 9 patches might be fun. Right now we're making Project Linus quilts for Camp Coco (a camp for children with cancer and blood disorders). We had a few different watermelon fabrics and lots of greens among our donations, so I put together a Disappearing 9 Patch kit with watermelon fabrics as the main focus, the seeds as the constant center square (which gets cut into smaller squares) and a big variety of greens to form the rectangular "border" strips around the melons. And what is eating outdoors without a few ants?!?

If you know what a D9P is, you can imagine what this will look like when it's cut up and resewn. I'm actually working on this one myself at the Make A Blanket Day tomorrow, so I'll post a photo of what appears when a 9-patch disappears. We have several D9P's in transformation at the moment.

My stuff. I'm starting to treat my Project Linus work like a real "job," so that my other quilting time is just for me. Those projects will be in another post. After tomorrow I am putting away the Linus stuff for a few days!

Geometric abstract art. There was a wonderful slideshow of early 20th century geometric abstract art in the New York Times online this morning. The pieces are part of the Newark Museum's collection (not New York,  Newark!). I love this style, and I think many of them would make wonderful quilts. Take a look at the slideshow by clicking here, and check out the accompanying article here. I'd love to make a quilt modeled on the feel of this red and white one, which I pasted in here to encourage you to take a look at the others.

Winter. And finally, we have had snow, snow, and more snow. And even more snow is on the way Sunday and Monday -- another 5 to 7 inches! We weren't hit as hard as the mid-Atlantic, but I'm still sick of it.

This is what snow used to mean in our house 20 years ago! It's easier now, but not quite so much fun.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I was just pulling out our Thanksgiving leaves from years past because we read them aloud every year. When the kids were little, we'd each write something we were thankful for on a leaf to put on a tree, or sometimes we'd put feathers on a turkey. We wanted them to realize that they had a lot to be thankful for.
And what were they thankful for? Well, one leaf says:

"I'm thankful for scotch tape. It's sticky and it sticks to my fingers."

And there's a feather that says

"I'm thankful for no more world wars ... yet anyway."

They're a little more sophisticated now (!!), but they are still appreciative of things, and I am very thankful for them!
Ah, these nicely stacked boxes belie all the work -- and the huge mess!-- that went into filling them. I sorted and cut about 1 bazillion squares the last few days. They're from the Linus stash and we need to turn them into quilts.
Someone donated a pile of pre-cut solids that are just gorgeous, but there aren't enough for a quilt. So I pulled some other solids and sketched a layout. This one will be beautiful!
I got a little of my own stuff done, too -- cut my blue strata into squares (so hard to do -- I loved the big blue strata). They are much less impressive now, but they should look good again when reassembled with some other stuff. I hope so!
And what's this? At my guild's quilt show, I won a raffle! Twelve quilted placemats, one for each month of the year. Wow! They're just terrific, I love having them.

Some exciting news for the next few days -- tomorrow I get to meet another quilt blogger, and this week I see my grown-up kids!

A very
Happy Thanksgiving
to each and every one of you!

Unexcused absence

Oh my, the summer got away from me. I didn't intend to back off from blogging, but I got b(l)ogged down and couldn't give it the attention I wanted to. I think things are on a more even keel once again.

Since I last posted, most of my quilting has been for Project Linus. I do enjoy it, but it seems to have taken over my quilting and I am trying to contain it. And on the personal front, we had some big family celebrations this summer (two major birthdays) and both our daughters moved -- one to Berkeley, California, and one to New York City! Wow! I foresee a lot of travel in my future...but I couldn't ask for more fun places to visit.

In a renewed effort to do my own quilting, I am heading downstairs to clean up my space and get going. Here are just a few photos until I have some real stuff stuff to show.
My guild's biennial quilt show was a couple weeks ago. Very cool -- the quilts were hung among the historic aircraft in the Rantoul Air and Space museum! Here's the Project Linus booth -- you can see our string quilts and strippie quilts (thank you, Mary, for the instructions!), as well as others that we made. Almost all our Project Linus info was picked up on the first day of the show!
And this is Carol Doak, Queen of Paper Piecing, wrapped up in her special Tribute to Carol Doak quilt. She taught a class here in town, and she's a fantastic instructor. Paper piecing has never been my thing, but I feel now like I can do it when I decide I want to. She was terrific.
And the skills we work so hard to develop, Mother Nature simply gives to spiders. Look at this amazing web I saw on my walk the other morning -- and look at that HUGE green spider in the middle! There was a section of the park I have dubbed Spider Alley because it was one web after another.
Isn't this one just gorgeous?

For those of you who emailed me or just checked to see if I was posting, thank you. I'm baaaaack!

Catching Up

It always happens -- I put off something that seems like an overwhelming task, and then when I finally bite the bullet and do it, it really isn't so bad. I was way behind in the blog I keep for my guild's Project Linus Committee, Hearts for Linus. My old computer made dealing with photos extremely difficult, so I thought I'd wait until I got my new computer to update that blog. But when I got my new computer, I was soooooo far behind, the I felt overwhelmed and just kept waiting. Finally, yesterday and today, I got caught up! Only took a few hours max.
Because I was catching up on Linus, I didn't work on my own projects. Since I showed you some of the cut strippie quilt kits in the last post, I thought I'd show one of my favorites all made up. These strippies show novelty fabrics off so well, and I had a great time rummaging through our Linus stash of donated fabrics to find things that worked together. It's great practice in design!
I didn't notice until I looked at this photo that the cats look stretched out behind those middle strips! Next time I'll be sure not to put the strips in the order they were cut -- though a kid might have fun looking at that.
And just for fun, here's a close-up of another one with really cute frogs. The colors in the photo are off (that's a beautiful lime green in the middle), but it's still fun.

Tomorrow it's quilting time for MY projects! Stay tuned...

How clever is this?

I wish I could take credit for this Drunkard's Path quilt, but it was in with some fabric I bought at a guild auction.
This is no larger than a placemat, and the Drunkard's Path is not pieced, but it's fussy cut from circles. What a great result!
Along with the little quilt came the fabric that was used to make it -- look closely and you can see the holes where the circles were cut out for the little quilt. I discovered the gaps when I started to cut a strippie quilt for Project Linus with them. I'm not going to be able to cut enough strips from the Swiss cheese fabric, so I'll end up making a different quilt with them. No big deal -- they are such fun fabrics!
Here are 6 strippie quilt kits I cut today (which is why I haven't been making progress on my own projects -- we have a worknight tomorrow and I'm getting prepared). Just in case you don't know about Mary Johnson's easy but wonderful patterns for donation quilts, hop over to Mary Quilts and take a look. It's an incredible resource and Mary has generously donated her time and talents so that quilters can download these patterns for free. She also has a blog, MaryQuilts - Making Scrap Quilts from Stash, and runs the Heartstrings Quilt Project. I've decided to make strippie quilts tomorrow night (listed on Mary Quilts as Quick Strippie, under Q) because we can piece lots of tops in very little time. At the moment my friend Joe, who has a new longarm machine, is practicing on Project Linus tops, and we aim to keep him very busy!

Scrap quilts

Finn asked on her blog, Pieces from my scrapbag, if we would post some scrap quilts over Memorial Day weekend. My guild has a huge collection of donated fabric, mostly scraps, that we use to make quilts for charity. I thought I'd post a few that I have never put on my blog before.
I love the black and white trails in this one, and the huge assortment of bright fabrics. I believe this quilt was donated to a local children's home. As you can see, it's simply B&W 4 patches and fabric squares. It doesn't get much easier.
This quilt was donated by a guild member (I'm sorry I don't know who) and was clearly made from scraps. It's twelve 15-patch blocks joined with sashing and bright cornerstones.
This is a very sweet quilt made with lots of scrap strings, I think using Bonnie Hunter's String-X pattern. It was donated by a guild member. [Update: Just heard from my friend Bunny -- who needs a blog of her own! -- that she made this quilt and did indeed use Bonnie's String-X pattern.]
This quilt is a standard pattern that we use to make kits -- we just cut 6-1/2 inch squares from our donated scraps and strips of solid sashing, and any guild member can take a kit home to put together. I hope this one ended up in the hands of a child whose favorite color is blue!
We sort our stash into broad categories or we'd never find anything! For this easy attic windows quilt, we cut squares from our stash of animal fabrics and used our solids for the window frames and sashing. This is another one of our standard kit patterns.

Scraps are wonderful, aren't they?

Acres of quilts

Saturday was Project Linus Make A Blanket Day in our area. There was a big gathering about an hour from here, but in our local area, 15 of us pieced 10 tops and got 8 others underway!
Isn't this awesome? We laid all the tops of this type together, and I climbed on a chair and took this photo (doesn't show nearly all the tops!).
One corner of the layout had a top of Sesame Street and coordinated character prints. Gives a very different look.
We made another Illini (orange and blue) string quilt, and also started on one with dotted green stripes.
I am off tomorrow for California to see DD#1, my mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces and their families. Fun! I hope you all have a great week, and I'll be in touch when I return.