September Monthly Recap

September was a month filled with pondering, planning, stash shopping, and stitching.

Studio Squirrels Exhibit A  - the quilt top and scrappy pieced backing for Ludiosis were started and finished, neither of which were seriously on the radar until after the first of the year.

The long-planned set of twelve new pillows achieved a major milestone with the top slabs stitched and the batting and backing for those slabs cut.  Next month I'll get them sandwiched, quilted, and trimmed to size before cutting any of the pillow envelope backing pieces.   The goal is to have them in use by early November.

The vacuum sealed pillow forms were released from their packages and are expanding while the rest of the process proceeds.

Exhibit B for the studio squirrels is Candy Corn - a gift project that saw a quilt top and a finished quilt started/completed during the second half of September.

Exhibit B-Part 2 is the long runner made using the three extra columns from Candy Corn.  

On the intentional side of things, Rastro (the second bonus quilt from the Macnas series) became a finished quilt.

Githerments, the third bonus quilt from the Macnas series, was pin basted and is ready for quilting/binding in October with thread chosen and bobbins wound.

Motley, the fourth bonus quilt top from the Macnas series, was donated to Many Hands and Many Hearts along with yardage I had planned to use for binding.

September saw plans come together and significant prep work for several sets of seasonal utility mats and placemats.  

The squares cut for December's set of reversible utility mats (posted here) have now been sorted into groups for 5 top slabs and 5 back slabs ready for piecing.  Batting and binding strips were also cut.

(Above) Six 

tops (gray print), six backs (spotted black), and six pieces of batting were cut this month with lots of binding made for a second 

set of January placemats.  

I pulled this gathering of pieces from the resource boxes to make a companion set of five utility mats for January.

The scrappy tops will be pieced using these fabrics and the backs will be cut from companionable yardage (pulled but not shown).

I finished this pair of gift pillowcases on the 29th making them the last project of September.

Finally - squirrel Exhibit C - introducing Dug.

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Stay tuned for lots more stitching/quilting/binding during October. 

Quiltdivajulie

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"Little by little, one travels far."

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ludiosis - the Flimsy

In this photo, the top for Ludiosis is sewn, partially pressed, and hanging over the upstairs balcony alongside its scrappy backing.

I am SO happy to see how well the two sides suit each other.  I thought they would but we all know how doubt creeps in around the edges.

(LUDIOSIS - noun meaning the sense that you're just making it up as you go along)

As seen from the downstairs perspective in the late afternoon light.  

I don't usually press all seams open but I did for these blocks since they would end up being rotated as needed during layout.  

This is what the back side of the top looked like after its final pressing.

This is the front of the top after pressing.  

The finished flimsy on the design wall - 52" x 72"  

There were well over 100 different fabrics used during the making of these 4" blocks.  All of them came from the resource boxes (fabrics less than 1/4 yard), leftover binding strips, excess cutting from previous projects, and unused blocks from other quilt tops (including some gifted by Lynne).  The narrowest strings were cut at 3/4" and the widest pieces 3"

I calculated at one point that if all 234 4.5" pieced blocks had been laid end to end, the total measurement would be have been 1,053 inches (equal to 29.25 yards) long.  That's a lot of happy scrappy goodness.

The first photo (and the top 2-3 rows in this photo) show the most accurate colors.  I can't wait to get Ludiosis quilted and outdoors in natural light for more true-to-real-life photos.

Quiltdivajulie

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"No matter how chaotic it is, wildflowers will still spring up in the middle of nowhere."

Sheryl Crow

Studio Squirrels At Work

In the last post, I mentioned my dilemma for backing Rastro.  

The large scale floral in this photo was intended to back Motley (the fourth Macnas series bonus quilt).  After weeks of dithering, I finally decided that Motley, the top, will be donated to Many Hands and Many Hearts so it can become a comfort quilt.  

That decision left the floral yardage available and, truth be told, I like it better for Rastro than either of the other scrappy pieced backing options.

There wasn't enough yardage to match the design along the center seam so I inserted a strip of Kaffe Fassett 's 2021 Moss Flower.  

And now there are two freshly pressed backings hanging on the balcony - Rastro's on the left and the one for Ludiosis on the right.  (both are approximately 62" x 84").

And speaking of Ludiosis, despite my earlier statements about setting the blocks aside for later, this has become a full-on project (thank you, studio squirrels).  

I simply had to put some of the blocks up on the design wall to reassure myself that my plan would work.  Happily, there's definitely enough potential to keep going.  As of Thursday evening, I need only another 30-40 blocks before I can take these off the wall and start on the real layout.  

I'm very glad I did not follow the tutorial's suggestion to sew everything into one massively long strip before pressing and trimming individual blocks.  I've had so much fun adding the narrow cut off edges into the fabric mix and trimming the 4.5" blocks a little along.

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With another ten days with temperatures in the high 90s predicted, I'm hopeful this run of available studio time continues.

Quiltdivajulie

Moving Ahead

I will need an empty design wall in the coming days meaning I needed to deal with the scrappy backing fabrics for Ludiosis.  Some of these vertical seams are sewn with others waiting to be stitched.  

(thanks again Lynne for the HSTs)

Ludiosis will need a back 62-64 inches wide by 84" long, so I'll quickly be able to tell how much I need to add to each side.  I've already realized there isn't enough of the single fabric I had hoped to use but that just means I get to go shopping in the stash.

I did finish leader-ender stitching the first seams for the blocks of Scrumdifferous and am well into making scrappy blocks for Ludiosis.  That 4.5" block count is somewhere between 50-60 now of the nearly 300 needed.  This has become my evening play-time stitching project.

All twelve pillow slabs have been pieced and pressed.  Batting has been cut for each of them along with an assortment of backing squares from the stash.  

Getting to this point really feels like a milestone for the project.  I know there's still quilting, making envelope-style flaps, assembly, and binding the completed covers - but somehow those don't seem nearly as daunting as what's already been done.

When I ordered the new 16" pillow forms, I was surprised to find they now come vacuum packed (the bottom five layers = 10 forms).  

I opened one package upon arrival (the two normal-looking inserts on top) and now it is time to open up the rest of them.

I mentioned needing an empty design wall soon and this box of fabrics left from previous backings is why.  I had thought that they would become the pieced backing for Rastro (one of the Macnas bonus quilts) which I hope to quilt and finish by the end of September.

But then I looked back through my photos for the project and saw this one. There are some of those fabrics I used up but there are others I still have.  

Hmmmmm . . . now I need to pull out the remaining pieces from that second photo and ponder how I want to proceed.  And given my history, most of you can guess where this is going :-)

As Dory would say, "Just keep swimming stitching!"

Quiltdivajulie

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"And the dandelion does not stop growing because it is told it is a weed.  The dandelion does not care what others see.  It says, "One day, they'll be making wishes upon me."

B. Atkinson

More Pillow Slabs and Squirrels

There are only two more pillow top slabs to piece before I press all twelve and square them so they're ready to pin baste.

However - the studio squirrels have been busy distracting me.

Backstory - I've been stashing leftovers and gifted pieces and parts for the past year or so and sorted them into several potential projects over the past six weeks.  

This particular group was set aside to become the scrappy backing for a quilt project I named LUDIOSIS (noun - "the sense that you're just making it up as you go along").

(includes backing fabrics from Kefi, Xanadu, and Fandango plus HSTs gifted by Lynne during her new-flooring-induced studio clean out)

Now the HSTs are sewn into columns (shown here folded in half), and the also-folded-in-half leftover backing strips are pinned to the design wall.  

The water lily print from Repose may or may not make the 'Final Cut' and the same is true for the floral backing from Kefi.  Very much in the still-thinking-about-it phase. 

The overall plan is to get this scrappy backing sewn together and hung in the waiting to be quilted closet.  That way the back will be ready when the quilt top is done and pin basting is imminent.

This photo shows the jumbled contents of a second project box for the quilt top including leftover bindings, Macnas series rectangles, tumblers and extra blocks from Lynne, and strips from a number of  previous projects.

And now I have this - a tall stack of cafeteria trays containing those random leftovers cut into uniform 4.5" widths by an array of lengths.

The tray on top holds stacks of newly-sewn strip sets with the next addition pinned so I can use these as leader enders once the last 10-15 Scrumdiffereous pairs are sewn.  

My inspiration came from the 2023 Scrap Happy Quilt tutorial by Gigi's Thimble.  That said, I am not going to sew all of my 4.5" pieces into a massively long strip like she did (been there, done that with the Dumpster Diving quilts).  Instead, I am sewing groups of pieces together, trimming out 4.5" blocks, then adding any usable cut offs to the trays of available segments.

This green basket on top of the stacked trays contains close to 40 finished 4.5" blocks.  I need nearly 300 for my 54" x 72" plan, meaning there's lots more sewing, pressing seams open, and trimming ahead.

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So I don't loose total control to the squirrels, once all of the blocks for Ludiosis are made I'll use Cathy's SAR (some assembly required) approach and put them back in the project box to be turned into a top after the last three Macnas bonus quilts are finished.  

Quiltdivajulie

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"It is better to do something than to do nothing while waiting to do everything."

Winston Churchill