GO FORTH: they are warm. and they shall know they are loved!

i did TWO posts this week! if you're interested in seeing and reading about one of our family's oldest and favorite traditions, click HERE.

 just like the song that never ends, here are some 9 patches that seem to go on and on... 

99 leftover 9 patches, to be exact! leftover from RSC18 (eclectic  AND bohemian) and RSC19 (L/D 9 patches, pieced into an Irish Chain Family table cloth.) ( i see a couple donuts and shoo fly blocks snuck into this top, too...) 

in RSCland December is supposed to be Put All The Blocks Together Month. i try to be a Good Quilter, so after pulling this stack of blocks out of the Parts Department Drawer, i put them up on the design wall, doing my best to arrange them in a pleasing manner. i'm happy with how this top turned out (it's so colorful and cheery!) and i'll take it in to Scraps2Wraps this week, and we'll finish it up. (tying it)

then, it's ready to travel somewhere as a donation quilt- either locally, or even overseas... 

lots of blocks are being assembled this month- go see!

out of the sewing room, and into the world!

i actually have a few finishes to share this week! woo-hoo! my eclectic AND bohemian tablecloth (9 patches) is a holdover from RSC18. but this week, it's finally finished. (i'll do my best to get better pictures up soon!) pieced all from stash, and alternating the L/D placements, i focused on using mainly the colors red, yellow, aqua, purple, grey and pink. 

it certainly is cheery on the schoolroom table, and we had a family dinner on Thursday night, where the E&B family tablecloth made its debut. ( this is a lightweight "quilt"- no batting, just diagonal lines quilted through every other square of the 9 patches) i made it to fit the table when it's not extended. (there is another, longer tablecloth for when the leaves are in, and the whole family is home...) 

what can i say? i have alot of 3" squares... (all pictures will enlarge if you double click on them) 

recently, i had the happy discovery of some rainbow jelly rolls- both batik and tonal strips mixed together. immediately, i wanted to try out one of the "new" patterns floating around (or at least getting lots of interwebby love!)  Interweave. (free pattern here) 

i know Wanda recently completed a quilt top with this pattern, using batiks (she modified the pattern slightly as well) and i saw another one somewhere on my RSC wonderings. i thought i'd try weaving the warm and cool colors of the rainbow together for a baby quilt. 

i forgot that for each 2½" (2" finished) width of the top, it takes 2 strips. so, my completed experiment is only half as wide as i was originally thinking. (what can i say, i'm kinda bad at math sometimes...) i'm happy with how this table runner turned out, and plan on making a couple more quilts using this pattern. 

last up this colorful morning is a Strip and Flip quilt, which we'll use for a dedication quilt for a church baby. i love how it turned out! 

thanks for stopping! i appreciate my RSC community, and i promise to do MUCH BETTER at replying to your comments! you guys are such an inspiration to me, even though i don't post here to often! have a great week- we're off to Jacksonville, Florida on Monday to visit the in-laws. wish me luck- FLORIDA in JUNE? what were we thinking?! 

 

getting started on RSC22!

i thought i'd really switch things up this year for RSC22, and start working with some triangles! woohoo! even though my "base block" is my old standby, the trusty 3" square, i have a triangle die for my Studio2 cutter, and with the addition of lots of scrappy whites for the triangles, i plan on making a colorful throw size quilt this year.

each of these HSTs will finish at 2½" in the quilt ("designed" on EQ5) using some tips on magic numbers for quilting and quilt blocks from Rachel and Katie, I'll be making 3, 6 or 9 HSTs in the monthly color. 

this is my 9th (!!!) year sewing along with RSC, and while i still have MANY 3" squares to choose from in my drawer, they're certainly dwindling down in both numbers and variety. although i added some more red HSTs last night, you can see on the right side of my design wall that I've a good start on this new project. 

also: I'm working at laying out an everyday tablecloth from my RSC18 project, eclectic AND bohemian 9 patches. only 4 more rows to put up, and i can take this down and sew it together. 

and: after a 2-year hiatus, I'm back to sewing crumb blocks. as you can see, all the jars are overflowing. (and the cream/white jar is not even on the shelf!) last night i finished up and trimmed the red crumbs (they'll finish at 6" in a quilt)- there were a lot! I'll definitely have to keep my eyes out for some clever/interesting design ideas on how to use the crumb blocks in an interesting quilt/layout. 

it's hard to tell without a reference for scale, but the above and below 2 pics are of rectangles and squares that are smaller than my usual crumb blocks. they measure 9½" X 4½" and 4½" square. i have a bunch more of these sizes pieced in other colors, left over from RSC15 (?). i never did anything with them, but will continue to build the collection of these for RSC22. 

my initial, and continuing idea, is to do something along the design lines of Crazy Mom's June QAL. i finished one of these quilts last summer; it's a favorite of mine, and is a great (bright and cool) summer quilt for my bed. I'll keep pondering this idea as i make more blocks each month for RSC22.

43 red crumb blocks made a huge dent in that overflowing scrap jar. there are stills some seed reds in there; they can breed and multiply until next year. (ha!) 

although i made an effort to sort out my different reds by value and saturation, i wasn't nearly as particular as I've been about it in years past. i decided that it's not really necessary to be quite that particular...

and: if you're looking for clever OR interesting quilts, (and beautiful!) be sure to visit Angela's blog on Saturday mornings! inspiration abounds over there... 

also linking to Oh, Scrap on SUnday. 

click here to read all about our birthday adventures and pear placemats! 

Repeating Rainbows!

sporadic, but colorful sewing happening in the sewing room these days! youngest daughter, BJ (13) wanted to make a Rainbow Quilt for her bed. how's a mother to say no? (purely a rhetorical question, of course! she doesn't...) 

using my AccuQuilt Studio2 cutter, we sorted through my stash of {white based} LV fabrics, and a nice gradation of rainbow colors, and cut out enough rectangles to make her a quilt about 80" X 90". 

BJ wants all the colors to be visible across the bed, so she designed/sewed it with the red rectangles at the top (pillow) end of the bed, going down through to the purples at the bottom. as you can see, the quilt is not all sewn together; it's still on my design wall. i'm loving this quilt, too. it's one of the best rainbow quilts i've seen... 

AND: i even have a finish to show! RSC19 was the year of the 9 patches for me: L/D centers, as well as eclectic AND bohemian color combos. i was hoping to mimic the soft and muted look of Jolene's quilt from Blue Elephant Stitches .

obviously, i didn't quite achieve that, but it's ok! this quilt was completed in time for our *big 4th of July bash*, and it's not really a quilt, per se, it's a tablecloth.  it's shown here on our schoolroom table, which is also the Big Crowds and Family Is Here So We Need More Places To Sit table. 

do you recognize the jelly cupboard in the corner? it's from our New Albany rental house. after a bit of scrubbing and wiping, i decided to bring it to our home and use it for extra schoolroom storage. although, i will say, after bringing it into a *relatively finished and clean* house, i can more clearly understand why it was relegated to the cellar in the first place. it's easy to see more potential in a cellar environment than may actually exist... 

there is no batting in this quilt- it's just the top and a backing. (just like our summer bed quilt.) i love how it turned out- i set the blocks on point, used a brown for the side setting triangles and the binding. ( i read somewhere that brown has all the colors in it; it's great to use it for binding a multi-colored quilt. i follow that advice often.) 

 there was a method to my madness in the laying out and design of this quilt, although it's hard to see in the quilt itself. the colored drawing above makes it much more obvious. i was going for the cascading, converging and melding of the lights/darks/rainbow colors. if you squint hard and run by quickly (or fill the table with lots of food) i guess you can see it?

anyway, if anyone asks, or wants to know, the name of this Family Tablecloth quilt is Converging Memories. there are fabrics from a lot of the sewing that I've done for the last 30+ years. as i was photographing the quilt this afternoon, i spotted a yellow calico from 1988 that was the kitchen curtains in our first home!

also: i should have refreshed my memory by reading my posts from when i first started these 9 patch blocks for RSC19. that was the year that i made the L/D 9 patches, as well as the eclectic AND bohemian 9  patches. i had blogged that i intended to make 2 tablecloth quilts: one for WITH the leaves and one for WITHOUT. 

oops! 

well, this one will fit really well with just 1 leaf. (it fits fine with 2 and no leaves as well, but i wish i had remembered that... ) 

be sure to go see what everyone else is working on- there are lots of creative quilters to meet, and colorful quilts to see every Saturday morning over at Angela's blog. 

June was blue- or was it green?

although the "official" color of June was (is) blue, for me it seemed like it was really green!

so many green things growing: hydroponic lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli, kale, swiss chard, herbs, sweet and hot peppers, pumpkins, summer squash, zucchini, cabbage, cucumbers, eggplant, sweet corn... 

our CSA/Farm Share pickups have started, and with our biggest group of members ever, it's keeping me busy. and mostly exhausted, too. 

i did sort out all my 3" blue squares at the beginning of the month, and sewed 16 of my eclectic and bohemian 9 patches- 8 with dark centers, 8 with light centers. 

9 of my "split rails" of sorts blocks happened, too. i also cut out my isosceles triangle quilt for this month- a dark {and ugly} Kansas Troubles blue with a creamy calico as the alternate triangle. there was so much of the KT that it's the backing and binding, too! 

click over to Angela's SoScrappy blog- lots of beautiful blues happening over there. (and soon it's a new month and new color- can't wait!) 

just under the wire...

WHAT?! it's still August while I'm posting this... haha! it was very busy at the beginning of the month, followed by a slow remainder of the month after loosing all our fall crops to some localized flash flooding...

 

but: we're all fine- house, children, belongings... and there's always next year (said almost every farmer ever..)

so: oranges and browns. pretty sparse in my stash- so it was fortuitous that both those colors were together, giving me a bit more to work with...

blogger grabbed the pictures all mixed up, so bear with me...

3 of the Squared Away BOM- you can tell I really dug deep to finish out these blocks..

and 12 eclectic and boho 9 patches. just a couple more months and colors to go...

fourteen 9 patches with kona indigo- don't know why I only got pictures of 8... I couldn't believe how many kona oranges I had- I think there were 8! not sure how that happened...

 

I've been busy with baby quilts (grandchild #4, a girl, due in a few weeks!) and after next week's baby shower, i'll share that quilt here) think: kona cotton solids and the 3" squares. I never seem to get tired of those...

click on over to soscrappy to see what everyone else is working on- and for the new color, too!

bleeding red: a photo dump for July!

I saw a hashtag on instagram: #julyvalanche and I can attest that that accurately describes July (and August) in the gardens and fields! SO. MUCH. PRODUCE.

 

lots of Farmer's Markets, too- sometimes 3 a week, but it's all good! Most of our produce is selling well, and we're eating well ourselves. life is good!

4 more 9 patches with the Kona indigo. I think I have a few more reds in my stash, but I need to dig them out first...

17 more eclectic AND bohemian 9 patches were added to my stack this month.

I've made progress on the Squared Away BOM, just no pictures to sew. (maybe next week...) I've pulled the red and teal 3" squares for my RSC18 Growing Up Odd, but that's as far as I got...

Be sure to click on over to So Scrappy and see what everyone else is doing!

all the pretty little {aqua} squares!

my fingers are flying as I type zippy-quick like... today is a busy day with a 12th (!) birthday party planned at the amusement park (Knoebel's) for A. excitement is running high, of course, and still some things to do to be ready to leave on time...

17 blocks of aqua 9 patches- eclectic and bohemian is the look I'm going for...

and a lonely tag-along of pink from last month...

4 indigo 9 patches in the Kona: teal, breakers, cyan and turquoise. azure coming soon, as soon as I have time...

 

be sure to go look at what everyone else is working on as we finish out aqua, and wait for the next color...

As pink as a.... baby's bottom?

it's ridiculous to start every other post with "it's been a crazy busy week around here..."

but- it is what it is. spring came (to stay!) this week, and it's always the busiest time on a farm. but when it's winter winter winter SPRING! it's busier than usual...

I had an evening of perusing my pinks- more than I thought, but not as many as other colors.

I picked out my stack of 9 patches (again, loving these combos)

and then another evening of sewing. I also cut out a few new spring dresses for the girls ('cause when they ask, you know mama's gonna sew!)

 

looking forward to *hopefully* a bit more sewing time today- more dresses, more pink. see what everyone else is working on here.

in which...after a long absence...all of a sudden...BAM!...it's green and yellow...and SPRING!

life, the seasons and the quilting just roll right along, whether we're ready to stop and take (or post!) pictures or not!

it's been a loooooooong winter: as recently as just over a week ago, we had 4" of snow. (it was gone by lunch time, but still. still!) suddenly, it seems as if it's finally decided to be spring! it's Friday evening as I post this, and even more recently as Tuesday night, it was 24° degrees, with a skim of ice on B's little pond outside the kitchen window.

today was mid-70s, with tomorrow promising to be high 70s. so in the space of 1 (1!) day we've gone from it's entirely too cold to plant anything to there is a list of a minimum of 9 crops that need to be planted in the next week. we'll see how much of that actually happens, as we haven't even begun to till, plow or spray...

my eclectic and bohemian 9 patches are coming along nicely: 17 more to add to the pile..

Growing Up Odd is shaping up, too. I added 11 more blocks for the yellow and green. not entirely sure if i'll have too much, or not enough, of one color and/or size, I've already decided that if that happens, i'll deconstruct a few blocks and use those squares in the borders.

 

my Squared Away BOM is all caught up.  I'm liking that so far, too, and enjoying working with some triangles for a change. (late night, bad lighting, poor picture. sorry!)

 

 

              

and don't worry: I'm taking lots (and lots!) of time to hug, kiss and snuggle that new little grandbaby! the newborn stage is my favorite... (and maybe even more so now, because I'm the grandma, and I get to sleep through the night, no matter what!)

click on over to see all the other lovely spring colored blocks on Saturday morning...