Fiber fun.............

I made a couple more blocks yesterday after running some errands.  I have lots more short strips, the size in the small blocks, in the scrap bag so I'll continue making the small blocks in spare moments.  I'm thinking of a medallion style quilt at this point.

I searched through my oldest Kaffe fabrics and came up with two more light fabrics.  I have one more in the basement.  Now I need to find a few more dark fabrics and get them pressed and cut.  I haven't turned on an iron yet so I can't start sewing the pinwheel blocks yet.

While out running errands yesterday I found a miniature Chrysanthemum plant for $1.  I briefly considered buying 3 of them and replanting one of my porch pots.  Then I came to my senses and just bought one for my kitchen.

 

Early autumn in northern Illinois.................

The Black Eyed Susan in the crack of the sidewalk is dying back and now I will try to cut it out of there and plant it somewhere else.

I touched the blooms on the Zinfin Doll Hydrangea and they are dry enough to cut a bouquet now.

This is the only Black Eyed Susan still in full bloom.  Since it is so dry here I expect it to change pretty quickly.

I am so thrilled with the growth of this red shaggy center Coneflower plant.  I had a previous one that started coming up a second year and then died.  I planted this one last year about this time after keeping it in a pot from the garden center for most of the summer.

The Sedums are in full bloom and just starting to dry a little.  I think the color will deepen as they dry.

This Hairy Alumroot Coralbell gives me great joy every year.  It is the largest of the Coralbell plants and the blooms usually stand tall all through the winter.  The leaves on the Coralbells never die back totally all winter, and in the spring when new growth starts I trim the old leaves off.

Blue.....................

 

While I was in the basement doing laundry I cut some of the dark blue fabrics for my pinwheel quilt.

After that I mailed packages from my destash sale on WandafulQuilts.  The grocery store is across from the post office so I made a stop there too.  

I spent some time trimming leaves off the tomato plants so there would be better airflow and hopefully sunlight hitting the green tomatoes.  After what I thought was a lot of trimming I could hardly see any difference in the plants.

Last night I paired the dark blues with the leftover light blue triangles and started sewing them.

I had intended to trim the pink/green triangle quilt and cut the binding but instead I was reading.  On my last trip to our local thrift shop I found 3 books from authors I have previously read.  I hadn't read a novel in 4 years. The only books I have read in that time period are quilt books.

Play day 3...........................

I altered 2 of the blocks I showed yesterday and had fun making a bunch of smaller blocks.  I'm only using the scraps in the bag so far.  I need to cut some more black and white fabrics into scraps.

I guess this is the best bloom I'm going to get on the little Flare Hydrangea.  I have been trying to be faithful watering it since the directions said it needed to be watered every week.  I hope the little bush will get larger next year.

My luck with planting flower seeds this year has been about 1%.  All of the zinnias got eaten by bugs, the cornflowers were dug up twice by little critters.  I planted Forget-me-not in this pot and 2 months later nothing had come up so when I found a fifth volunteer tomato plant I put it in this pot.  Then 2 Forget-me-not plants came up.  The first has withered and dried and this is the second one.

This little volunteer tomato plant was pretty frail and it has still produced Sungold tomatoes.

This is 4th of July variety still producing.

Lots of clusters of tomatoes.  These are Early Girls.

This is another Branch of 4th of July variety.  I made use of my short shepherd hooks holding up the long branches.

This is the top of the SunGold cage, 5 feet high.  These are very prolific.

I have a few tomatoes on the Rutgers plants and quite a few large ones on the Big Beef plant.  The squirrels take bites out of any that are near the ground so I need to prop up a branch with about 8 tomatoes on it.

If you are interested, I have a destash sale going on at my WandafulQuilts blog page.

Sunday night fun............

After spending time creating my blog post on WandafulQuilts, I grabbed the scrapbag of Kaffe collective fabrics and had fun with some mindless block creation.

My destash sale is live on WandafulQuilt this morning.  Lots of Laurel Burch fabric and other fabrics and miscellaneous items.

More photos and editing................

More cutting etc. today for my destash sale this week.  I will start writing the blog post on my WandafulQuilts blog today and have it ready to post tomorrow morning.  I'm hoping to get everything sold and shipped before I get my new pacemaker on the 26th.

I found this block yesterday while looking through "stuff".  I should probably make some more of them.  I know I have a bag of small Kaffe collective scraps.

 

Working on destash...............

 No sewing yesterday. I had one more batch of Laurel Burch fabric I had to iron before I could cut it.  Iron, cut, fold, photograph, and package.  That was my day.  I hope to have everything listed for sale on Monday.

Oh, and I also had to water the tomato plants and all of my pots.  We are in a dry spell, no rain in sight.  There are a few areas east of me that are already in the drought area.  We are in the abnormally dry area and will soon also be in the drought area.

Some blue choices...................

I decided to look for some Kaffe collective dark blue fabrics to go with the light triangles.  Most of the darker blue fabrics have other colors in them so I tried to choose ones that had a larger percentage of blue.  One of these is a Brandon Mably fabric and the rest are Kaffe's designs.

I think the one at the top left is Kaffe's and the rest are designed by Philip Jacobs.  I will probably look for a couple more light blue fabrics too and then I'll be ready for cutting.

I had 2 dishcloths almost done so I finished them while I watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  I had missed a couple episodes over the summer and last night's episode had millionaire winners.  They were teams of 2 for this season.

Some things I found..................

I did my grocery run yesterday morning and I couldn't settle on doing any one thing the rest of the day.  I started going through things in a bookcase and found these 2 magazines, from 1997 and 1998.  The Beanie Babies at that time were so hard to find because everyone was buying them.  I have given all of my Beanie Babies to the great-grandchildren, a few at a time.  It is so hard to throw pristine magazines into the recycling bin (but I sure don't need these).

Then I was cleaning out a bin on a shelf in my studio and found this box of Kaffe Fassett thread that is too pretty to use.  Pathetic, I know.

Next I was looking through the project boxes in a little shelf unit made especially for the boxes.  I know I started cutting these triangles before May 2011 because that is when I bought my Studio die cutter. From that time on I cut the triangles with a die, and the corners are nipped off the triangles on the die.  These triangles have sharp points so they were rotary cut.  I'm really not interested in this color group any more, rust, purple, green and gold.

Then I decided to open the box of blue and green 6" triangles.  This is the same box the pink (pink/gray quilt) triangles were in.  There were a few squares already sewn, leftover from my pink/blue triangle quilt so I laid out a pinwheel block.

The rest of the blues in the box could be considered light fabrics so I could cut some 6" triangles from dark blues to pair with them and make a quilt top.

I decided to sort through the greens while the box was open and then it was late and time for bed.  Not a wasted day, just a day of miscellaneous.

 

First finish for September 2024...............

The name of the free pattern I used was Spa Quads and I think that had something to do with the fabric line they designed it for.  I need to come up with a new way to refer to it.  Graffiti comes to mind but it's not quite what I want.

It is 59" x 79" and has Hobbs 80/20 batting in it.  All of the fabrics, front, back, and binding are from e Bond's fabric lines (I believe there are 3 lines: Glyphs, Ravel, and Root).

This pattern was perfect for large prints.

 

Trimmed...................

I started out yesterday morning by baking a rhubarb cake.  It will be my breakfast for a few days.

Then I went to the basement and trimmed the quilt from a free pattern called Spa Quads and made with 3 lines of e Bond's fabrics.  I chose the black print for the binding because it is one I didn't use in the quilt top.  I am planning on doing this binding all by machine.

In the afternoon I started ironing all of the Laurel Burch fabrics.  Now I can start cutting them into fabric packs for a destash sale.  Saturday I had sorted through all of them and pulled everything smaller than a half yard and put them in my pile to keep.  I will have to have at least a half yard if I'm going to cut fat quarters.  

More Kaffe fabric..............

Sometimes I order the 6" rolls of the new Kaffe collective fabrics, especially when I think there might be a few I want to order but I want to see them first.  There are 20 fabrics in a roll.

This year they were labeled Cool and Hot.  This photo is most of the ones in the cool pack.  There were a couple I might have to have more of.

These 3 were also in the pack but I have already purchased a half yard of each of them.  I'm always happy when they have fabrics that read as one color prints.

This is the Hot group and there aren't any I would order from this group but I have a 6" strip in case I need one of them.

These 2 are possibilities that I may have to buy.  The one on the bottom is a really large print and very pretty in a few of the colors.  It is a Philip Jacobs fabric.

Pink trends (from yesterday's post) were discussed in a few of the comments yesterday and in emails.  One mentioned it was Mamie Eisenhower's favorite color and I had forgotten that.  In the 1950s my grandma talked my grandpa into pink wool carpeting for their living room and my mother painted our kitchen pink.  My 1954 house has pink ceramic tile in the bathroom.  Someone mentioned a revival of the pink/gray, maybe in the 1980s.  I'm not sure what year but I do remember that.  Now the pink is all Barbie pink after the movie came out.  For all of us who love pink we don't need to wait for a reason to use it.

Memories - 1956................

Sometimes when I cut too many pieces they are a burden.  I spend too many hours trying to figure out what to do with them.  In this case I had gone to the bin with all of the Kaffe "Spot" fabrics and saw a good size piece of this gray/white one.  I had just opened the box with the leftover pink, blue, and green 6"  triangles a day or so before.  This one was meant to be.  I counted the pink triangles (170) and then figured out how many gray/white triangles I could cut out of the piece I had (2 1/2 yards=144 triangles).  I don't know why I had such a large piece of the dotted fabric; it must have been in a really good sale.  This top is 66" x 79".  There are several Tula Pink fabrics in this top as well as Kaffe collective fabrics.

The combination of pink and gray immediately reminded me of the pink/gray trend in 1956.  The guys dressed in gray wool suits with pink dress shirts for all dress up occasions.  It was also the time of the pink felt circle skirts with a gray poodle on them, commonly just called the poodle skirt.

Sewn, ready for pressing................

The top is sewn as of 9:30 last night.  I'll press it and photograph it today.  I just love the pink and gray combination.  Now I'm not unhappy I overcut the number of pink triangles I needed for the previous 2 quilts.  It made this one a fast project.

I always pre-order some new Kaffe fabrics that come out in February and end of August.  This one is my favorite so I got 1 yard of it.

This was my next favorite so I got a little of each color.

 

Slow going...............

There are 12 cross seams to sew and I didn't get very far yesterday.  I finished the seams in the first direction in the morning and then started the cross seams last night.  Three of twelve are sewn.  I spent a couple hours yesterday looking for something that doesn't want to be found.

I have two more quilts ready for trimming and binding.  The one on the right will be done all by machine so it will probably get done first.

This week is the Sandwich Fair (DeKalb County fair) and the weather is cooperating nicely.  Today is supposed to only be mid 60s after 80s yesterday and I think a lot of people will enjoy the cool down.

 

Sewing started..................

I have 6 of the 11 columns webbed together.  I should be able to finish the top today.

If you want a preview of the quilts in Kaffe's new book Quilts on an English Farm you can go to Glorious Color's website shop  because she offers kits for lots of them.  Click on 'Kaffe Fassett Quilt fabric packs by book' and then click on the book title.  If you click on each photo it will enlarge a little.  The photos are a little dark so the ones in the book are prettier.

 

Final layout.......................

 

This is just a quick photo of the final layout of this pink and gray quilt.  It is my insurance in case I mix up some of the fabrics when sewing.  I decided it didn't make any difference if the dotted fabrics  were all turned the same direction.  If you look closely you can still see some dots run in straight rows and some in staggered rows, but this is a fast fun quilt.  I decided the pinks would just be scattered in a random way.  It will be a throw quilt.  I have the rows clipped and ready to sew.

This book arrived yesterday.  I have only scanned quickly through it as I had other things I needed to do yesterday.

143 blocks........................

The last 32 pink triangles were cut yesterday and sewn to a dotted triangle.  I can see now that the dots are printed in straight rows along one grain and staggered rows on the other grain.  I will have to be careful when I do the layout to keep them all going the same direction.  A few of the prints are Tula Pink designs and they are one way designs.  I hope this doesn't become a nightmare.  I will design it on a double design wall in the basement while I do laundry today.

Triangles.................

Not much happened here yesterday.  We had beautiful weather and it was a good day for relaxing.

I have 111 of 143 triangles squares sewn, none pressed yet.  I need to cut a few more pink triangles to continue.  I was able to get 144 6" triangles out of 2 1/2 yards of the grey and white dotted fabric that is paired with a variety of pinks, leftovers from 2 other projects. 

I rarely buy panels with Marcia Derse panels being the exception.  This one could be cut up in used in many blocks or maybe as a section of a backing.  Meanwhile I'm just enjoying looking at it.