Stitched In Layers

Watching a little golf this afternoon and working on an old favorite project. Grandmothers flower garden. Hand work is sew relaxing and with a pair of tiny scissors in a beautiful case makes the work just that much better.

Sew many more to make. Not sure yet how big or it’s purpose; it has a different yellow in every flower and each purple flower appears only once.

I read a Blog post at the beginning of the year from Quilting with Love called “Finisher or Opener: Which One Are You?” Inspired yet again to wrangle my store of fabrics and projects, I made my list of projects in finish in 2019.  I discovered some things.

• Many projects had been in a limbo for years really. Did I reach a challenging spot, find a mistake, or did I just get bored?
• So many projects bought and stored just waiting to be started!
• Several projects so large (lots of pieces), did I need a break, or did another deadline necessitate putting it away.

Then I visit shops, follow blogs, go on retreats, see my customer quilts and get inspired by something newer yet!  Now we are to 90 days left in the year and I am finding that I probably didn’t cull well enough!  Recently published by Modern Quilt Studio,  Redicovering Your Stash has some great ideas for helping me in 2020. I will share all the finishes later, right now I am getting busy and trying to finish strong.

In the meantime I wanted to share a start and finish for 2019.  In January I found a layer cake from years ago (I believe I will never buy a pre cut again).  I opened it and gave away instantly several of the squares. Then I went in search of a layer cake friendly project that wasn’t too big.  Something “quick”.  Recuperating from knee surgery at the end of March, and somewhat confined to one floor I began sewing and cutting with this pattern, called Arcade, in mind:

As usual, I found myself changing things here and there, and I tried starching the fabrics before sewing this time.  I liked how nicely the blocks pressed with the starch.  I sewed the blocks together at a quilt retreat this past June:

Then began the trial and error of deciding how to quilt it.  I had purchased several skill builders sets from Joyce Lundrigan  for my Gammill Statler and thought these fabrics would be busy enough to allow variation in how the designs were suppose to look in the planned quilt for the skill.  What fun designs, and boy did they stitch out nicely!

I even found a large piece of yardage I had purchased to use as a backing, as well as a batting remnant…thus a complete quilt from my stash.  What joy!

And more than 17 hours later (is that quick?) it is fininshed.  I did block this one, and plan to gift it when next need a baby girl gift.

Still managing to keep up! All my aqua blocks are finished!

Theses are sew fun! They are Cindi Edgerton’s Twirling Hexagons at A Very Special Collection.

Here are March’s green:

And February’s Yellow:

And January’s Red:

Put it all together and you have almost a rainbow! Not sure how I will arrange them yet, we have a few colors to go.

And I certainly had plenty other projects to work on, but I have followed these rainbow scrap project for years and just had to try it! It has been sew inspiring to see all the combinations and interpretations of the theme Angela organized at Soscrappy.

This first time Rainbow Scrap Challenge participant is having fun! We were red in January, yellow in February, an Green in March. Taking some time in January to plan this quilt out has made adding to colors each month easy and exciting. All of my greens are finished. With less than a week to go.

RED YELLOW

Here they are with a couple more to go!

And then I have a few other scrap quilts going. A string star begun with Augusta Cole over four years ago:

And my Log Cabin Play Day design that has been on ongoing leader ender project:

And lastly a patriotic scrap quilt called Road to the White House:

Maybe 2019 will be the year they move to the finished quilts list!

The Quilt show is in Hampton this weekend and always a great source of inspiration. Although I only have one block done I am enjoying the Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2019 HERE. Here is one of the yellow blocks to join the red ones from January. Time to get busy on green for March.