Keep Calm and Keep Sewing!

Good morning! Here's one of the things cheering me up this week.  My orchid is coming to life again, and I bought the orange Gerbera daisy at the grocery store the last time I went.  Outside it's a typical Wisconsin spring, alternating between rainy and cold, but inside flowers are blooming.

Quilts are happening inside, too!  My dog Bella is helping me show a quilt I finished this morning.  Pam, a very talented quilter in our guild designed this as a Block of the Month, starting last February.

The blocks were based on the Friendship Star pattern.  It was like working a puzzle, putting all these blocks of different sizes together, but Pam had good directions.  She urged us to use our creativity, and I took her up on it!  All the little Friendship Star blocks are my additions.

Pam added sewing machines cut from a panel to her quilt, and I liked that so much I added one, too.  It's a hand crank, of course, a people-powered machine, although I pieced the blocks on my treadle instead of one of my hand cranks.

The fabrics in this quilt are a mix of feed sacks, vintage fabrics that are not feed sacks, and 1930s reproduction fabrics.  It was fun deciding which fabrics to use each month, although I always made a giant mess dragging out scraps and auditioning them.
I'll show you the back of the quilt next week.  There's a story there.

I made this with the scraps!  It's a bread cloth.  I bake a lot of bread, rolls, etc. even when we're not in the middle of a pandemic.  Usually I cover the rising dough with a dish towel, but I've always thought it would be nice to have a special cloth for this.  Now I do!  (By the way, in this photo the cloth is covering pizza dough for last night's supper.  The plant is basil, which smells like heaven every time I brush against it.)

The back is a flour sack from "Mother's Best" flour.

They call it "The flour with a flavor".  Wonder what the flavor was?  This bag once held 49 pounds of flour.  Because the U.S. government standardized flour quantities during World War II, we know this bag was produced before that.

Continuing with the 1930s fabrics, this month's house blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are done.  It was hard coming up with teal/turquoise/aqua fabrics that would play well together in the blocks.

I like all 3 of them, but this one is my hands-down favorite.

Now that all these projects are done, I can spend the rest of the weekend making face masks as requested by hospitals.  Goodness knows, I've got plenty of fabric to use.

I hope all of you are well, and coping with the changes we have had to make.  We are not the first generation to deal with terrible realities, and sadly we won't be the last.  We can get through this better if we work together.

However, I have nothing good to say about toilet paper hoarders.

Be safe, be strong, be well.
And happy International Quilting Day!
Cheers for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Angela at So Scrappy
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict 
Cynthia at Oh Scrap