Binding a UFO and a Valentine's Day Quilt top

Back in October 2020, I took a class with Mary Elizabeth Kinch.  She loves to make big quilts with small pieces, but this class was for a small sampler quilt of four blocks with a border and sashing.  The pattern is called "Summerhill Quilt". I had it all pieced, including the borders within a couple of weeks of the class. I used colourful solid scraps from my scrap bin and some Essex Linen to make this quilt.  Several months ago, I pin basted the quilt and then it sat.  I looked at it often, trying to figure out how I was going to quilt it--Overall texture OR custom quilted with my walking foot.  This week, I finally decided on custom quilting with my walking foot.  This is the first block that I quilted. Each square is 1". 

I worked on it for several hours every day this week and today, I finished the quilting!  I will show close ups of the rest of the blocks when I reveal the whole quilt next week. I used Aurifil 28 wt turquoise thread for the quilting. This picture shows the centre of the quilt. 

When the quilting was done, I trimmed it and tried various colours for the sashing--turquoise, three shades of green and magenta.  In the end, magenta was chosen.  I started hand sewing the binding tonight and will continue working on it tomorrow for my Slow Sunday Stitching. 

When I was not quilting, I managed to get all of my bonus HST's trimmed.  Now, they are waiting on my ironing board to be pressed.  They are 1.5" square and will finish at 1" in the quilt.  Once they are pressed, I will play with a layout on my design wall.  

 A "squirrel" ran through my sewing room this week when I saw a free heart quilt pattern by Modern Handcraft called "Big Love" on Instagram.  I have had these fabrics in my stash for years and had not been able to find the perfect project for them until now. I scaled the pattern down to make a wall hanging. 

The plan is to quilt this one over the next few days and hang it up for the month of February for Valentine's Day. I will be piecing the back with fabric from my stash. 

My husband and I went for a hike at a local conservation area on Thursday afternoon.  It was cold but there was no wind and the sun was shining!  Perfect day for a walk in the woods!

Finn wants you to know he is keeping an eye on things!

I will link up with Kathy in the morning.  

Red Scraps and a Gift

The red scraps were flying in my sewing room this week.  I have decided to do three rainbow scrap challenge quilts this year. When I made the selvage hot pads as Christmas gifts, it quickly became apparent that my selvage collection is out of control!  I had sorted some of my selvages into bags by colour so I grabbed the red bag and some light-weight non-fusible interfacing and made two squares. 

I also pieced some smaller red scraps together and used my drunkard's path rulers to make 4 quarter circle blocks.  They are not sewn together yet as I am not sure how I am going to put this quilt together yet.  

Here are all my red scrappy blocks for this month. I cut the selvage squares in half--they may become flying geese or HST's--I'm not sure yet. 

At a crafting retreat in the fall, one of the crafters was making Christmas cards with her Sizzix machine. She had a variety of Christmas/Winter dies with her. I offered to make her a zippered pouch if she would cut some shapes for me to use in my Christmas scrapbook.  She agreed and gave me a baggie filled with shapes before she left as well as her address so I could mail the bag to her.  I finally got around to making her bag this week in her colour of choice, purple. It's in the mail and should arrive soon. 

For my slow stitching this week, I finished off the binding on the children's comfort quilt for the local women's shelter.  I also finished knitting the green dish cloth but did not take a picture. I made a backing for another bed sized quilt for the women's shelter and will show it when I get it back from the long arm quilter. 

Someone at the retreat gave me a bag filled with cut off triangles, mostly black and white, with a few blue and orange ones thrown in.  I sewed them all into little blocks this week and now they are waiting to be pressed and trimmed. The sewing took a little longer than it should have as I ran out of bobbin thread and did not notice until several seams had been sewn with no thread!  I'm not sure how I will use these yet.  They finish at 1 3/4" squares. 

It's very cold where my daughter and Finn live.  He had a haircut this week and is looking quite skinny!  They went for a walk yesterday and he wore his coat and his boots. I think he was glad to get home and curl up in a warm blanket afterwards! The eagle-eyed among you will notice that my daughter's coat and Finn's match.  

I will link up with Angela for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching.  

Easily Distracted...

I have been working hard lately to finish off some old UFO's, AND, I have been making progress on this goal. My guild is having their biannual quilt show this fall, and I want to have some of these projects finished to put into the show. I have to confess that yesterday and today, I fell off the UFO wagon and started a new project.My zip lock bag of bonus triangles from completing the first half of step 3 of Bonnie Hunter's Dec 2009 Carolina Christmas quilt was sitting on the table in front of my sewing machine. (There is a pile of bonus triangles in the lower left of the picture above--aren't they pretty?) In my last post you can see how I played with a few of them at last week's QNIC (Quilting Night in Canada) at Jacqui's house. I put them away that evening, intending to leave them in the little zip lock bag, unpressed and untrimmed until I finished my Carolina Christmas quilt. BUT, they kept calling my name, until earlier this week, I took out a few and ironed them. I put them back in the bag. Then, decided to iron a few more and trim off the dog ears. Soon, all of them were ironed and trimmed. Yesterday, I thought I would just lay out one block and sew it together. I did not have a lot of time to sew yesterday so this was a welcome break from the paperwork project I was working on. Pretty soon, I had 4 blocks completed.
Today, I sat down to eat breakfast and those blocks were sitting on the table, staring at me again. I thought that today, I should just make 4 more to go with yesterday's 4. I made 5. Then, I started looking in my stash for sashing and corner blocks... I liked the navy blue with the orange corner blocks.
Before I knew it, I had the whole thing pieced and ready for quilting!
I have put the rest of the bonus HST's back into the zip lock bag and have put them away, out of sight. Now, I must get back to those UFO's....