Monsters, Potato Chips, and Rail Fence

 Welcome to Treadlestitches! 

Here's a happy silly little quilt made to be donated.  It's sewn from orphan blocks (the half square triangles and the two larger pieced blocks) and squares cut from a panel of encouraging monsters.

My wonderful quilt group had a challenge to use panels in a quilt.  (Thanks, Nancy Queen of Scraps!)  I found these guys in a box in the basement where they've languished for years, and put them to work.  This is my favorite one.  All kids should know they are loved.

It is definitely okay to be different!  Even if you have four arms and eyes on stalks!  These messages were meant for kids, but we grown ups need to know them too.  

I had a little trouble cutting these monsters out of their panel.  As usual, they were not printed perfectly straight (sigh).  To get the monster plus the saying I ended up with a sliver of color from the panel on a couple of these.  I'm trying not to worry about it.

Here's the back, a wild print I've used before, with a solid green binding.  The hsts are leftovers from a Rainbow Scrap Challenge project a couple of years ago.

Check out Eeyore in the border!  I added 2.5 in. (cut) scrappy squares for the outer border.  The batting is a frankenbatt from my 80/20 scraps.  I washed the quilt before donating, which is why it's kind of crinkly.

It's been fun working with yellow this month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  Are you participating? I always love seeing what other quilters are doing.  Here are this week's blocks.

My most "sensible" set of RSC blocks are these potato chips.  I only make 4 each month because I don't have very many pre-cut rectangles for each color, and each block takes 12 (plus 6 light ones).  I'm expecting to get two baby quilts from these at the end of the year.

This block has a monkey, a pink dog, honey bees, and a cat's face in the center.

I'm also making rail fence blocks.  I'm trying to shade them from light to dark.  Not always successfully, of course.  There aren't very many yellow scraps in my scrap baskets, so I'm repeating fabrics a lot, but it won't matter when the quilts are put together.

Speaking of rail fence, how about a new project?

I opened my new issue of American Patchwork & Quilting, and here it was!  It's called Rainbow Rails, and was designed by Laurie Matthews.  You can find it in issue #188, pages 33-39, on newsstands now through June 7.

This was exactly what I needed for my solid and light/low volume strips!  I practically ran upstairs to get started.

As usual, I modified the pattern to fit my strips.  Plus I cut rectangles rather than making strip sets, just because I'd rather work that way.  The pattern calls for 1.5 in. strips, which I changed to use my 2 in. strips to cut 2 in. x 5 in. rectangles.  My blocks will be 4.5 in. finished, and I'm making 90 of them.  In order to have a good variety of low volume pieces I limited each print to 10 rectangles or less.

Here's what I had left after cutting.  There is still a lot!  Maybe I need to make bigger quilts?

In other news, we're getting some good spring weather, and the tulips are blooming.

April showers are definitely a real thing here.  When we can't get outdoors we can color or draw.  Or quilt!

Have a wonderful week, whatever the weather brings.

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

Trip Around the Rainbow

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  

After a couple of weeks of attending more to my regular life, I finally have a little finish.  It's a Trip Around the World baby-sized quilt that I'm calling Trip Around the Rainbow.  Like everybody else, I have lots of UFOs I could work on, but there's nothing more fun than a new project.  (I know you know what I mean!)

Over the years I've made lots of these Trip Around the World quilts.  The only difference here is using the rainbow as a color guide, with red in the corners working toward purple in the center.  The squares are cut at 5 in., and the quilt is 40.5 in. square finished.

Here's the back, a "cloudy" purple with white stars.  The binding is a multi-colored print of fireworks.  For quilting, I stitched an X in each square with the serpentine stitch.  The batting is a soft and warm poly, from the roll given to me by my friend Joey.  (Thanks, Joey!)

There are hardly any novelty prints in this quilt, which is unusual for me, but I chose the fabrics mostly for intensity of color.  Two butterfly prints made it in, the orange and the aqua, and there are also light blue bubbles and yellow stars on blue.

This pattern would also look good with the colors reversed and red in the center.  Maybe I'll make one like that sometime.

The binding for the TATW quilt came from this large piece on the left.  I bought this stack at the Historic Bloomington Antique Mall in Bloomington, Indiana, where we spent a long weekend including viewing the eclipse.

It was a fun place to browse.  They have two floors plus a basement.  Of course my eyes went right to the antique quilts.

Hubby and I met at Indiana University and graduated in 1976, so when we found out Bloomington was in the path of totality we decided to go there.  The campus was beautiful as it always is in spring, with lots of flowering trees.  The eclipse itself was amazing and beyond my powers of description.  The university had set up a viewing area in a meadow, with live music and food stands and hundreds of people.  When the sky turned dark the street lights turned on.  The birds disappeared, and bats flew out over our heads.  Then suddenly the light came back, but everything looked strange.  Truly an awe inspiring experience.

Indiana's spring is farther along than Wisconsin's.  Their daffodils were mostly done, but we did see a few in their prime, like this one.  The gorgeous yellow made me think about the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month.

Stretched stars were quick to make from 5 in. cut squares and 2.5 in. white squares for corners.

These are small, so I'm going to need lots of them!

I also made some more hexagons for this project.  I don't have very many yellow 1800s reproduction scraps, so I have to repeat a lot.  It won't matter in the finished quilt.  

Weirdly, I just realized how similar both of these yellow sets are.  Both have light stars that appear when you set them together.  And both only have two seams.  Hmm.  I didn't plan it that way at all.

Who loves legos and the library?  This Little Guy!

I hope you have as much fun as he does this week.  And every week!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

Cats, Flying Geese, and Butterflies

 Welcome to Treadlestitches, and welcome to April!

It's a new month, and the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month is yellow.  Now's our chance to cut up our yellow scraps and sew them into blocks for future quilts.  I started with my Rainbow Kitties, just because they're so much fun.  

I think of these more like stuffed animals than real cats.  In addition to prints with birds and dogs, we've got stars, swirls, flowers, and even sushi.  I can hardly wait to put these into quilts for children.

Yellow is really brightening up the sewing room, especially on all the rainy days this week.  Yellow scraps also looked good today, when we had sun and blue skies.

The yellow 3-D Flying Geese are flying in this week, too.  I'm getting lots of ideas of what to make with them when I have all the colors done.  I might try a couple of different options. 

Last week I mentioned this project, a UFO dating from (probably) the 1970s, that started out with large butterfly-shaped blocks to applique, and which I changed to these pieced butterfly blocks.  Here are the yellow ones.  A very bright (screaming?) yellow was popular in the 70s, and often had little flowers/figures in blue, red, and green.  I'm finishing the quilt as a donation to charity from the ladies at the church where our quilt guild meets.  This week I got all 20 blocks done, so I'm excited to choose sashing, cornerstone, and border fabrics.

Just a word about poly-cotton fabric.  Processes to make it were invented starting in the 1950s, and by the mid 1960s even kids like me had heard of "permanent press".  I remember my grandmother talking about how great it was with the neighbor lady.  Ironing was a huge chore when clothes were made of 100% cotton.  By the 1970s, when I was starting to quilt, it was tough to find any 100% cotton in the fabric stores.

There are lots of different kinds of polyester and poly cotton fabrics from this time period.  The best ones are 50% poly and 50% cotton.  Almost all the gingham in this era is 65% poly and 35% cotton, and it is slippery, nearly see-through, and pills after just a few washings.  Not ideal.

When I chose which butterflies to use, I picked the ones that would hold up the best and would also contrast with the muslin background.  I ended up with 16 blocks, and added 4 more from my vintage scraps.  I didn't use the original blue gingham, but I replaced it with a red and white vintage cotton gingham (I'll show more pictures as I finish the top).

I'm enjoying "remodeling" this old project, and I hope the church ladies will be pleased.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, I started work on this puzzle.  It's called Caterday Afternoon.  See all the cats?  I didn't even try to count them all.  There were only 500 pieces in it, and it was great fun finding all the colorful cats.  Not too challenging, but I'm not working puzzles to drive myself crazy!  As I worked on it I realized several reasons why I liked it.

There were at least two tuxedo cats, which Snicklefritz and I heartily approved.

Books about knitting sat on shelves.  Hmm, there are a few books like that in this house.  Lots of the cats in the puzzle had knitted sweaters.  Hard to imagine cats putting up with that!  I'm just knitting dish cloths with cotton yarn at the moment.  (Isn't it fun how variegated yarn turns out?)

The cat puzzle also had several houseplants.  After a long winter, I'm building up my windowsill garden with herbs.  The rosemary and lavender survived from last year, and I've added this basil...

and thyme.  The last two were small plants from the grocery store which are happily growing, especially on days like today when the sun encourages them.

I'm not sure what these blue flowers are called.  They were blooming at a school where my Little Guy has speech lessons.  It's lovely to see flowers coming back to life.  Welcome, Spring!  Glad you're here.

I'm glad you are here, too!  Have a wonderful week, whatever the weather gives us.

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

P.S.  One more photo of our little boys at the Children's Museum, specifically the Harley exhibit:

Go, guys, go!  But don't forget your helmets!