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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Lil Jack

This little 5" cutie is from Happy Hollow Designs "Pumpkin Spice Espresso Goblin Kit." These kits come in a paper coffee cup, complete with sipper lid. Too Cute.

I have their big jack o' lantern pattern and thought I'd do this little one to try working with the fusible quick grid that the patterns are based on. It's pretty easy to work with, but I did have a little trouble getting those corners & points turned - guess I need to snip the corners a bit more when I do the big one.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Using Up "Orphan Blocks"

I've been trying to tackle my scraps and beat them back into submission before they completely take over my sewing room. So far I have sorted all the smaller scraps into ziploc bags by color, except that several colors have enough that they won't fit into ziploc bags, but that's beside the point :-) I've been pretty good about sorting larger scraps/remnants/odd purchases into bins by color or bags by project, but the little scraps were getting way out of hand...

ANYWAY, while sorting the various and sundry bins, baskets and walmart sacks full of scraps, I came across several orphan blocks and decided to get busy.

This first one is a little 12"x18" doll quilt made from 1" squares. Way back when I made "Winds of the Seasons," I couldn't decide how I wanted to do the borders. One of the ideas I toyed with was these scrappy little sections of 3x9 random squares. I went another direction (much better!!) but never did anything with those odd border chunks until now. I just stitched them together en masse and did some super super simple quilting. I didn't have enough of any of the fabrics to do the binding, so in keeping with the extreme scrappiness of the quilt, made a scrappy pieced binding.This next little doll quilt is a whopping 15x15. I'm not even sure where this block came from - it's not one of mine. It must have been in a box of random fabrics that I got either came from hand-me-downs, a garage sale or freecycle. The world may never know. When I was sorting all those fabric scraps, my little helper saw this block & decided she needed a quilt for "Big Dog" - one of her fave stuffed animals (bet you'll never guess what kind of animal it is- LOL). So I grabbed a scrap of muslin, a leftover bit of batting and some random binding from another project and Big Dog now has a quilt!

Getting Caught Up

I'm finally all caught up on my BOM's in progress. All the blocks from the 2009/2010 Cabbage Rose BOM are complete and ready to put into some sort of simple setting - I'm thinking denim blues for sashing & borders?

And here are the first four blocks of this year's BOM. These are 14"blocks, and looks like they'll all be variations on Bear's Paw blocks. I've never worked with 1800's style reproduction fabrics before - lots of neat browns & blues (and one really weird orange/brown wavy stripe)! At 14" this is going to be a large quilt...