Started sewing..........

I decided to sew this quilt top together for another finish for June.  I still have 3 rows to sew so I'll finish it this morning.  I didn't get anything quilted and totally finished so a couple tops sound good for my monthly total.  

It cooled off last evening after a few storms passed near us but it was still tropical humidity.  I went out and pulled some grass around my peonies and found a few other weeds to pull.

I will be mentioning my pop-up shop every day until it opens so newcomers and occasional readers will know about it.

The pop up shop will be July 7 - 12.  It will open for email subscribers at noon ET on July 7 and at noon ET on July 8 for the public.  It will close at midnight ET on July 12.  There is a form on my right sidebar to subscribe to the email list or use this link.  If you signed up previously you don't need to sign up again.

A dozen blocks...........

This is a happy dozen blocks isn't it?  It is fun to see how some of the large prints look cut up.  I will continue making them when I need something to sew.  

I'm itching to start a new project.  Aren't we all?  I have been working so hard on the pop-up shop that I didn't want to do any major thinking and cutting this past week.  I have the offerings mostly together now and dates set.  The pop up shop will be July 7 - 12.  It will open for email subscribers at noon ET on July 7 and at noon ET on July 8 for the public.  It will close at midnight ET on July 12.  There is a form on my right sidebar to subscribe to the email list or use this link.  If you signed up previously you don't need to sign up again.

I forgot to check the black raspberries on Saturday so there were lots to pick last night.  I had easy cooking yesterday.  My son dropped off a bar-B-Q sandwich and pea salad in the middle of the day and for my evening meal I had a dish of ice cream with black raspberries.  That's my favorite kind of cooking!

Repeat fun............

That was so much fun Friday that I made 4 new blocks yesterday.  I have lots more strips to use........

I also made 3 more Churn Dash blocks with the Kaffe Collective fabrics.  I have 12 done now.  I'll bring them upstairs to get a good photo of them all together tomorrow.

I'm still working on a pop-up shop.  If you want 24 hour early access you can sign up on the email list form on my right sidebar.  I don't have a date set yet but it will be soon.

Easy sewing.............

I had a hard time getting started doing anything yesterday.  We had some rain in the morning and then stronger storms in the late afternoon.  My rain gauge had 3/4" of rain in it.  

I was going through all of my cutaway strips strips yesterday.  They are the crooked portion I cut away on my batiks before I make the cuts for a project.  I decided to sew a few blocks.  They will go with the blocks in this post eventually.  I have 69 sewn right now and will make more off and on until I come up with a plan for them.

Last pleasant day..............

No sewing yesterday.  It was the last of the low humidity days we have had this week so I went out and pulled lots of Goldenrod, cut branches so I can get to my black raspberries easier (had the first 10 berries last night).  I trimmed back one of the Weigela bushes and started another one.  Then I worked on weeding the garden path.

The Annabelle Hydrangeas are just starting to turn from white to lime green.  We are expecting some storms today so I wanted a photo before the blooms get beaten down by the rain.  I have a wide overhang so maybe I'll be lucky this time.  There are some Milkweed plants growing right up next to them too.

This is one of the pretty Hostas near my garden path.  The Lily of the Valley, Violets and Creeping Charlie act as ground covers so the soil doesn't dry out too fast.  I occasionally clear around a plant but it all grows back quickly.

Waves and net.........

I loved all of the comments and votes yesterday for my layout.  One that I hadn't considered was running the rows horizontally so they would look like waves.  I decided to change the top and right triangular section to waves and leave the rest as net on the beach to see if that would work.  I think I would have to run all of the fabric rows horizontally where I have them all vertical now.  I think that might be fun to try but I ran out of time yesterday.  I'm working on a pop-up shop and that means hours of finding photos, taking more detail shots and writing descriptions.

A friend who lives a couple towns over emailed me to see if I would be interested in some starter for Amish Friendship bread.  I hadn't made any in years and was very interested.  She brought me 2 cups of the starter so I could go ahead and bake with the first cup and then squeeze and feed the remaining cup for 10 days.  I baked the first batch last night.  If you don't know what the Amish Friendship bread is just search the internet and you will find more than enough info on it.  My directions say to butter the pans and then spread cinnamon and sugar on the buttered pan.  Some of the others I found said to just spray the pans with cooking spray.  According to one site there is a whopping 223 calories per slice.........

Beachy colors................

I was looking through my Marcia Derse fabrics and one of her older lines was called "Shoreline".  The colors were reminiscent of the beach, water, driftwood, sea grass and other coastal things so I thought I should make a summer vacation quilt.  I added a few pieces from some of her other lines too to have a good variety.  This is the first layout, kind of like twisting rope.

This second layout looks like a net thrown over the sand.  I just had to turn the blocks in every other row for this layout.  Which one should I sew?

Here is a closer look at some of the fabrics.

I was surprised last night to see my miniature Beebalm.  I didn't think it had survived.  It doesn't get any bigger each year, still small like it was when I planted it.

I started clearing out the Creeping Charlie, Violets and Lily of the Valley growing in my path around the Redbud tree.  I have at least one more day working on it.

A few changes...........

I made a few changes on the layout of this quilt yesterday to spread out the yellows and golds a little more.  Kaffe had a lot of yellow and gold prints in his first 20 years of fabrics and more than half of the strips in this quilt are his early fabrics.  After I took this photo I took down the rows and clipped them to prepare for sewing the top.

I am still picking the tomatoes as they show a little color.  I haven't seen as many squirrels in my yard the last few weeks but I'm not taking any chances.

The black raspberries are getting bigger.  They start out green, then red and finally turn black.

The tall bellflowers are in abundance everywhere on my property again this year.  The flowers are a more brilliant blue/purple than they look in the photo.

Onion rings layout.............

I decided to make the extra seven blocks for an 8 x 10 layout, 60" x 75".  I think this is the final layout but I'll look at it at least one more time to make sure I don't have the same fabrics next to each other.

For me seeing the blocks closer gives a real view on a scrap quilt where there is so much variety in fabrics.

Kaffe collective churn dash blocks

I also sewed three more churn dash blocks.  I haven't pressed them yet so they are a little puffy on the design wall for this photo.

The first of the brown eyed Susan plants have started blooming.  A friend gave me this plant about 25 years ago and said it was a native variety.  The centers get darker as summer goes on.  It grows to about 4 feet tall.  It spreads easily so I have some in the back garden too which hasn't bloomed yet.

I have a second hydrangea bush by my dining room picture window.  We got about an inch of rain last night so some of the flowers are flopped over.  I think this one has a new shoot growing off from it so I could plant in a third location.

68 blocks..........

I got caught up on the strip pieced Kaffe collective fabric blocks with the Onion Rings center strips yesterday.  It was more humid so I only spent a little time outside cutting volunteer trees.  I have 6 piles of 10 blocks and one pile of 8 blocks in the photo and thought this was all of them but then I found 5 more blocks laying by my computer.  If I do a 8 x 9 layout it would measure 60" x 68" which isn't a very good proportion.  If I did 7 x 10 instead it would be 53" x 75".  That is more of a body shape for a throw quilt.  I'll play around with the layout today.  If I want a 8 x 10 (60" x 75") layout I would need to make 7 more blocks.

A finished quilt top........

I decided to use the already prepared circles for the centers of the daisies.  I sewed them on by machine with invisible thread and a narrow zig zag.  Since this will be a throw quilt I didn't see the need for hand applique on the circles.  After sewing on the circles I finished sewing the quilt top together.  It is 48" x 65.5".  I briefly considered adding a border but then remembered I want to be making smaller quilts.....I seem to end up with larger ones most of the time.

I had been watching for the Asiatic Lily to bloom.  About 5 years ago I bought 6 of them for $1 each at the end of the season.  I'm down to only one now.  I had to cut some volunteer trees to be able to see the blooms.

It is such a beautiful shade of yellow.

Farther along in the back garden is an area of colorful plants. The Coralbell doesn't look very healthy.  Maybe I should consider planting the one I have in a large planter in there instead.

I love this Hosta.  I think it is a Gold Standard.

I sewed some more pairs of 2" strips and also made a few more blocks for the other current quilt top.

I found it...............

I knew where I had last seen the bag with the Mylar circle and some centers tried on a previous quilt but I didn't dig down far enough until yesterday and there it was.

What I didn't remember is that the circles had already been gathered and were ready to be appliqued.

I tried them on the wallhanging and they match well enough with the daisy colors.  This would be the easy way out to just use them.  The fabric is purple cotton woven one direction and gold metallic woven in the other direction.

Close up view.  No decision made yet.

I took this photo of the hydrangea bush by my front door at dusk last night.  This bush got completely ruined last year when they put my new roof on.  It came back just fine.  It is so nice and perky now, until the first heavy rain hits it and then it will be drooping down on all of the plants around it.

I'm so happy I went with this unusual color petunia for my porch pot.  I have never seen one like it before.

I saw the first Monarch caterpillar yesterday munching away on the milkweed.  I went back in the house to get my camera, got sidetracked, and by the time I remembered it the caterpillar was hidden away somewhere.  There are lots of leaves with big sections eaten away on several milkweeds so maybe there is more than one of them out there.

How to avoid looking for center circle fabric........

I am trying something else today with fonts.  This is the normal size set to Bold.  This is large.  Why is there such a difference in size??  I want the large that was available the first time I tried the new Blogger format.  And this is the largest font.

I still haven't attempted to find the center circle fabric for the 3 daisy blocks for the previous quilt.  Maybe today..........

Here are the first 6 churn dash blocks.  Some of the large prints cut up just fine, others have such a wide range of values in them that I'm not sure about them.  I'm having fun with these blocks and have more combinations chosen for the next group.

And then I had to use up the rest of the 2" strips that were sewn in pairs.  I wanted to use the Onion print by Bradon Mably so it is the center strip in each block.  This is 20 of the 30 blocks I have already sewn.  I have more strip pairs waiting to be pressed and cut so this will be a throw quilt.

3 new starts...........

I had to go to W*lm*rt yesterday for all of the items I can't get at my local family owned grocery store.  I got enough for a month.  I have only been over there one time (in May) since the shelter in place order so this was my June trip.  They didn't see me at all in April.  I used to go over there 2 or 3 times a week to walk 2500 steps and then pick up a few items.  Times change.

My neighbors on each side of me mowed their lawns so I felt obligated to mow mine.  I wasn't going to because we have only had an inch of rain in the last couple weeks and there were some brown areas but I didn't want to be the shaggy lawn in the middle.

So........I didn't look for any fabric for centers on the daisies but instead cut 3 more churn dash blocks.  I only found a center for one of them so far. 

Only a little progress...........

I got the last 3 rows sewn together and up on the design wall but I still haven't made a decision about the centers of the daisies.  I know I have a mylar circle the right size for the centers but it wasn't where I thought it was so I'll look for that today.  As much as I would like all three center circles to be the same color I haven't come up with a solution yet.

My first tomato was turning red so I decided to pick it and let it ripen inside.  I just couldn't stand the thought that a squirrel would have the first bite of the first ripened one.  It will probably take almost a week to get fully ripened.  This is one of the 4th of July tomato variety.  I bought 2 larger plants that already had blossoms on them and this was on one of them.  The smaller plants that I bought are big now and have 2 or 3 bunches of tomatoes started on them.  There are 5 or 6 tomatoes to a stem on these plants and they are small to medium size tomatoes, just what I like.

Partially sewn........

The scariest part of this project was trimming the daisy blocks to match up with a 4 block section of the quilt.  I wasn't paying a lot of attention to which way I had the block turned to trim but all 3 luckily came out the same with 3 light rays and 2 dark rays touching the top edge.

This is how far I got yesterday.  All of the sections in the top 2/3 are sewn together and pinned to the wall but the daisy blocks aren't sewn in yet.  I need to add their centers before I sew them into the rows.  I just stacked the bottom 3 rows and pinned them to the design wall so I could move the furniture out and vacuum the room.

It is still nice and cool-smallest text, next size larger text, what they call normal, and large, what I usually use, except I change to Arial because I think it is easier to read.  I can hardly read the blogs that use normal as their default size.  It is especially hard to read if they use a color for the background. Now on to what I wanted to say - It is still cool here so I went out again last night and cut out all of the dead black raspberry canes and cut more volunteer trees.  Garden cleanup is going well and I think we will have one more cooler pleasant day so I will continue working out there.

I'm trying to figure out why large font today is larger than in previous posts.  This is normal and this is large.  Quite a difference.

Almost there..........

I sewed all of the rest of the rectangle blocks and played with the layout for about 2 hours.  I moved the bottom daisy block down one row since I had added a row of blocks to the left and 2 rows at the bottom.  It needed moving for balance.  Now I wondered if I should put in 5 daisy blocks instead of 3 since 3 was so perfect in the smaller size.  Do they look kind of lonely now?  I need to decide on the center circles for the daisy blocks, whether they should all be the same or 3 different fabrics.  I really want to vacuum that room but it would take almost 100 pins to pin the blocks to the design wall so I'm stuck until I sew some rows together.

I switched to a different project with all of that indecision.  I sewed the parts for 9" churn dash blocks.  I was using 10" squares and didn't have enough fabric left to cut center squares.

I remembered I had a bag of 3 1/2" Kaffe fabric squares in the basement.

This was the best squares in the group.  There weren't a lot of choices since there were 12 alike of a lot of the fabrics.

I decided to go ahead and sew them.  This will be one of those evening sewing projects that I work on now and then and eventually I'll have a plan.