Antique inspiration...........

I saw a photo of an antique quilt on a couple different blogs and thought it looked like fun because it has lots of my favorite shape in it, triangles of course.  I didn't analyze it well and made triangle strips going 2 different directions.  By the time I realized that I had over 30 strips of 5 triangle squares sewn together so I went in my own direction.  Yesterday I finally made decisions and got the borders all designed and sewn on.  It finished at approximately 64" x 75.5".

Here is the inspiration quilt so you can see there are a few similarities.  I decided to have insert strips sewn in to calm down the design a little and then made the decision to do a scrappy border instead of all one color.  You could probably sleep under the antique version whereas mine might keep you awake.

I don't know if I will finish anything else today.  I will be working on the many collages that I will need for my monthly recap and yearly recap and that will take a few hours, double checking that I have all of the photos in them.  I may only have the monthly recap ready for tomorrow and the yearly one on Monday.

Another finish...............

I spent most of the day hand stitching the binding, sewing the bottom edge of the hanging sleeve and sewing on a label on this colorwash wallhanging.  It ended up about 29.5" square.

The backing has another color stripe in toward the center of the backing.  I used that same color stripe for the hanging sleeve.  This one is made of all batik, front and back.  

I worked for a while on the border for the Sunday only top but only made decisions on one of the borders.  I need to work harder on that one today.

I spent a little time looking through the Kaffe Fassett's Quilts in Wales book and this is my favorite quilt.  I'll use it as a jumping off point but probably not using many of the same fabrics.  It is square so I will be adding rows of rectangles to make it rectangular.  It is named Vintage Library.  If you do an internet search you can find the photo of the whole quilt because they are selling kits for it.

 

Choosing binding.............

The binding is finally selected and cut for the colorwash wall hanging.  It is very dark, dull purple.  You could almost mistake it for dark brown.  Nice and neutral.

I got it sewn on and hand stitched about 4" to make sure I like it.  I think it works well so I'll be stitching away today.

I did another load of laundry yesterday and there is still one more load to do today.  I usually do a load once every 5 days, dark one time and light the next time.  I heard recently that the younger generation doesn't sort their clothes by light and dark when they do laundry.  I wonder if that is really true.

The light coming in the east window was just perfect to get another photo of a red bloom.  I didn't notice those 3 curls near the center until yesterday.  I'm disappointed the other stalk is growing taller.  The buds started opening a couple days ago and it looked like it was going to bloom a little shorter and all of the blooms wouldn't have to fight for space.  All I can hope is that it will get taller than the other stalk and the blooms will be higher.

 

Miscellany............

 A Christmas present arrived at my house yesterday.  I haven't spent much time looking at the book yet but I'll be going through to choose my favorite quilt soon

I opened to the first page and found this.  My daughter attended Kaffe's presentation in NC in October and she asked Brandon and Kaffe if they could personalize my book.  Wow!

In case you missed this in the last photo.........

Speaking of Kaffe, I got a few of his new 85 and Fabulous fabrics.  Since I have some pieces of the originals which he has repeated for his birthday collection I wanted to compare them and see if they were identical.  The new is on the left, old on the right.  The older one has some lighter colors and the red-purple ring on the big bullseye is a slightly different color.  It is easy to tell them apart because the new ones have a larger white selvage and bigger lettering.

Look for this motif in the next photo.

New is on the left, old is on the right.  This is the only new one that I can tell is an enlarged version of the old one.

I stripped the bed and did a load of laundry.  While that was running I chose some fabrics that I will use to make most of my test blocks with in 2023.  I may add some more as I go but I think I have a pretty good group of values for 2, 3 or 4 color blocks.  The dark ones in the top row are a dark teal, not black as they may appear on your screen.  Sometimes the only thing holding me back from testing a block is not being able to decide which fabrics to use.  I figure if I always have this group ready for cutting I will get a lot more blocks made.  The bonus is they will all work together for a quilt in the future.

We will be above freezing today and maybe get up to the low 40s.  50 tomorrow and Thursday.  I will get out and fill my bird feeders and enjoy the heat wave.

First quilt top finish for December................

I pressed the 12 big quilt blocks and then sewed this top together.  It is number 4 in the series with Kaffe Fassett yarn dyed woven stripes.  I have 2 more that I would like to make and then I think I'm done with stripes for a while.  All of the edges of the blocks are bias so it was hard to smooth this out on the design wall without distorting it.  The size is approximately 59" x 79".

I also finished quilting the batik colorwash so I'll look for binding for it today.  Only 5 more days to sew finishes for the month/year, Tuesday through Saturday this week.  I want to finish the Sunday Only quilt top for sure, just the border left to design and sew on.

 

Multicolor batiks...........

Most of my batiks are sorted by color but then there are the ones that are too multicolor so they get their own shelves.  Last night's fun was taking them down and sorting them by under a yard and over a yard.  This will make it so much easier for me to find backings for my colorwash quilts or any other small quilt.  I'm loving the nice neat stacks.

My favorite find was this purple and gray blue mottled fabric.  I have a half yard of it.

I found 5 other mottled fabrics that need to go down to the basement studio to join the others.  I have enough mottles left to have another sale of them.

There were 3 other interesting ones that I think I should use soon.  The dotted one on the left is a lot prettier in person.

This is another batik I would like to use soon.  It is pretty and also challenging to figure out how it will cut up. 

I will be doing a lot more sorting and documenting some of the fabrics that I want to use soon.

Merry Christmas.............

Merry Christmas!

This is the Christmas card from my friend Linda Swanekamp from the Art in Search blog.  She is a talented artist who paints and makes quilts, and many more talents I'm sure.

She comes up with a new idea each year for her cards and I treasure every one of them.

4 of the buds have opened on the Amaryllis, just one more to go.

I couldn't stop at one photo of the gorgeous red.  It is hard to capture all 4 blooms in a photo and this one shows the unopened bud better.

We got up to 12 degrees yesterday but still strong winds.  7-14 day forecast has us having above normal temperatures.  I'll take that, thank you.  Actually the 40s will start in about 5 days.