Black Cats, Multicolors, and Books

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

The black cats are here, in plenty of time for Halloween!

I made 20 black cat blocks as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  These little kitties told me they wanted their own quilt, so I said okay!  The border fabric came from a flea market, and I used up almost every last bit.

I convinced Snicklefritz, my very own black (and white) cat, to pose on the quilt for you.  

The back is a panel I bought at the quilt show rummage a couple of weeks ago.  

It's a cat print!  I had to add a couple of strips of stash fabric to make it wide enough.  I'll be donating the quilt to a good cause.

Do you have "too many" RSC projects?  I know I do!  I tend to get carried away, especially when I always choose such easy blocks.  Most of my quilts are made to donate to children, and I typically use bright colors and seldom include black, gray, beige, or brown. 

What about multicolor fabrics?

 Back when I first started with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, there was a month that called for Multicolor fabrics.  I hadn't yet started this obsession with novelty prints and didn't really have any multicolor scraps.  Boy, has that changed!

Since I have so many, I'm going to add them to my RSC projects through October.  Above are my Stretched Stars with multicolor centers.

Check out the Halloween print in the upper left!

Oh, dear, there's another headless dinosaur.  Ron and Ginny Weasley are looking on in horror.

The potato chip block got the multicolor treatment too.  Multicolor prints make some happy crazy chaos.   I apparently have cat prints everywhere, wonder why that is.

In other news, some new-to-me quilt books followed me home lately.  Do any of you remember Georgia Bonesteel?  She had a PBS show many years ago, and was famous for Lap Quilting, which at the time meant hand quilting using a hoop instead of a floor frame.  I eagerly watched the show and bought her books, but I had never seen this particular book before.  It's called Scrap Quilts from Georgia Bonesteel.  Good for inspiration, but the techniques are not what we are used to now. 

American Patchwork is a collection of true stories by quilters, and A Country's Call is a recent book (2019) of patterns for Civil War quilts by Mary Etherington and Connie Tesene of Country Threads fame.  They include short bios and pictures of real women from the Civil War.  

Lots of great reading ahead for the fall/winter months!

Speaking of fall, here's what I found at the Farmers Market this morning!  I could hardly believe we still could get local green beans at the end of September.  I'll freeze them and can the tomatoes later today, and just enjoy the broccoli and sweet peppers.

These Bartlett pears will be good eating, and they're a good size for the grandkids.  So funny that there's just one green one.

The grandkids and I are playing outside lately while the weather is nice.

Little Guy is even better at posing than Snicky!

Have a wonderful week!  I hope you have time for all the things you like to do.  Like quilting!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with these Wonderful Bloggers:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Rainbow Strings, Black Blocks, and Breaking A Bad Habit

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's still summer here, over 80 degrees every day which is unusual for late September.  My only complaint is the lack of rain, but we may get some this weekend.

As long as the weather holds, I'll be taking pictures outside.  I'm calling this little quilt Rainbow Strings, and it's my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge finish for 2024's blocks.

The border is a dark print, in honor of September being dark month at the RSC.  Just kidding, I just liked it with the strings because of all the colors.  It looks like fireworks to me.  I bought this piece in an antique shop in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were there for the eclipse.

The backing is also rainbow--rainbow stripes!  I had to add a strip of solid fabric each at the top and bottom to make it long enough.

I tried to lay the quilt out to get a flat photo, but somebody thought it was play time.  Snicky!  What are you doing?

I distracted him with a toy and quickly snapped this photo.

The quilting is diagonal lines in serpentine stitch, 3 lines across each 6 in. square.

There will be more string quilts to come, as I made a LOT of string blocks this year.

Black Blocks

Black scraps are fun in these potato chip blocks!  This block has 2 penguin prints, 2 cat prints, buttons, jelly beans, stars, stripes, and a Harry Potter symbol.

Here are the rest of them!

Also, I made these black hexagon blocks for my 1800s reproduction quilt.  They look kind of dull just by themselves...

but much better when mixed with the other colors!  Someone once told me black prints are to a scrap quilt like salt is to food--they enhance the "flavor".  This is a bigger quilt, and a more long-term project.

Breaking Bad Habits (or Trying To)

This mess is evidence of one of my Bad Habits.   Most of these pieces are leftovers from backing.  For many years I have mostly used light fabrics for backing (can you tell?).  When I finished a quilt and trimmed off the extra backing,  I had the bad habit of  just stuffing the backing strips in a basket for "later".

Well, it's later.  I have more time now that my grandsons are in school all day, so my excuse for not dealing with this has evaporated.  Oh, dear.  This is a LOT.

Remember this old joke? How do you eat an elephant?  The punch line is One bite at a time.  I would prefer not to think about consuming endangered animals, but I get the idea.  We can do lots of hard things by breaking them down into manageable steps.  So I started.

Step one was sorting out the few colorful prints and trimming them up into useful pieces.  There weren't very many, so that didn't take long.  Next, I divided the light strips into piles by width--small, medium, and large.  For the next week, I would take a pile to the ironing board, iron at least 10 strips, and trim them to useful widths.  If they were too short, I cut them into squares and/or rectangles.  It felt great to finish a pile, and that helped me keep going.

This is what I ended up with.  The strips are 4.5 in., 3.5 in., 2.5 in, and 2 in. wide.  All this has been added to the Parts Department for future quilts.  And now when I finish a quilt, I'm cutting up the backing strips as soon as I trim the quilt!

Are you ready for this?  I took this photo outside my grocery store last week.  Fall is coming!

Have a wonderful week, fellow quilters!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Check out all the great quilt blogs at these links:

Finished or Not Finished Friday

So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Oh Scrap

 

A Small Quilt Top, and A Tale of Two Quilt Shows

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Thanks for stopping by!

This week in sewing, I've been drifting from one project to another and not completely finishing anything.  Maybe I'm just distractible lately, or maybe I've just had some fun distractions like quilt shows.  Anyway, I got this small top together as a donation quilt.

I didn't even make most of the blocks!  A kind person donated them to our quilt group, and they were passed along to me because many of them used kid prints, like the Paw Patrol block.  And you know how much I love kid prints!

I separated the kid blocks from the rest and made 6 more.  I thought I had never seen this block before at first, but upon further inspection it's a Disappearing Nine Patch variation.  The squares for the nine patch are cut at 3.5 in.  Then the block is cut down the middle vertically and horizontally, and the resulting 4 squares are reassembled into this block.  Tricky when using one-way prints, but fun. 

The top is approx. 40 in. x 48 in., and I hope to quilt and bind it soon.

The sashing and border are dark blue--does that count as dark for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge?

The black Stretched Stars definitely count.  I don't usually use black prints in my donation quilts for kids, but I need to rethink that.  There are so many cute fabrics.  Just one more way the Rainbow Scrap Challenge has pushed me to think differently about color.

Now on to the Quilt Shows!

On Friday Sept. 6 I met a friend at the Great Wisconsin Quilt Show in Madison.  She and I have a long-standing tradition of seeing this show together, even back when it was called Quilt Expo.  In the last few years Covid and other health concerns got in our way, but we were back at it this year and loving it.

The quilts on display were, as always, amazing, and were made by quilters from all over.  I took lots of photos for my own use, but I will restrain myself from including any here out of respect for the makers.  Photos from the 2024 show are not yet up, but you can click HERE to see a gallery of the winning quilts from previous years.

Here's what I "won":  fabric!  All the fabric I bought was $8 per yard or less, which seems a lot like winning to me, especially when it usually retails for $12 per yard and up.  I roamed from vendor booth to vendor booth, scooping up the sale fabric.  Even though I am being more careful with buying new fabric, I'm not going to bypass cute prints at these prices!  I am already putting some of it to use.

I bought these 4 prints at a unique booth called Sew Renewable.    The fabric is all "pre-owned".  As they say on their web page:

 Our fabric is sourced primarily through purchases from estate sales, estate auctions, and donations by friends who no longer sew.

Keeping fabric out of landfills is a major goal of our  business.  

I love this!  They travel to quilt shows around the country.  They also have plans to sell directly from the web site, as they have apparently done in the past.  Click HERE to check them out.

Of course the quilt show was much much more than shopping.  It's even more than just viewing the jaw-dropping quilts!  We had time to talk and visit and participate in something we both love.  What a wonderful day!

So that was ONE quilt show.  Just yesterday (Friday), I went to the SECOND one.  It was a smaller, local show held at the county fairgrounds.   Two quilt shows in two weeks!  I am so lucky.

The local show creates these patterns, that they call "Seed Packets", and they hand them out for FREE with admission every year.  They are well written, and I have even made a quilt or two from them in past years. 

The quilts themselves were amazing!  Again, I can't publish the photos, but I took pictures to look at later and enjoy.  All kinds of styles were present, from traditional to modern and back again.

This was something new:

Every year this show has an area called "Granny's Attic", where they sell fabric, notions, etc. donated by their members.  Usually some items are priced individually, and most fabrics can be purchased by the grocery bag for a set price.  This year, however, shoppers were allowed to choose whatever they would like and give a donation of money in whatever amount they wished.  I have to admit, it was kind of hard to figure out what I owed them.  In the end, I guessed, basing my guess on how many grocery bags' worth I estimated I had.

This is what I ended up taking home.  There are yards of cottons and flannels, a small unfinished quilt that I plan to finish and donate, and some lovely piles of scraps.

Today I am washing the fabrics (but not the little scraps!), and hanging them outside in our beautiful sunny weather.

We are so lucky to have quilt shows to attend, from the big national/international ones to the local ones put on by guilds, who do all the hard work for free out of love for quilting.  There are always new things to learn, too, from classes and from viewing inspiring work by fellow quilters.  I would go even if there wasn't any fabric on sale!

I have less time with my youngest grandsons now that they're both in school full time, so we make the best of what time we have.  Almost every day we go out into the park.  They asked me to take this picture of them at the playground.

I hope you have as much fun as my grandsons and I have had this week!  Take care!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

Butterflies, More Kaffe, and Black Cats

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Does this butterfly quilt look familiar?  I finished the top a while back, made from a UFO started by an unknown quilter.  The project was passed on to our quilt group with the request that we finish and donate it to a charity of our choice.  (Click HERE for more details on the quilt.)

I made the top, but I knew my primitive quilting skills would not enhance it.  These butterflies deserved to fly!  Luckily, we have several very talented long arm quilters in our group.  Our own Nancy Queen of Scraps came to the rescue and did the lovely quilting.

I had it back to bind it, and got that done this week.  I hope the person who gets it can enjoy it for many years to come.

Here's yet another Kaffe Fassett quilt made from my scraps!  I adore these fabrics.  Recently I was cutting up scraps I was given, and discovered a bunch of small rectangles of Kaffe fabric.  I trimmed them to 2.5 in. x 3.5 in., and added in more from the stash.

The light green with the light blue dots is one of the fabrics from the scrap bag.  Most of the rest are from my stash.  The light print is definitely NOT a Kaffe print, just a fun one.

The pattern I used came from this book, Jelly Roll Quilts, by Pam and Nicky Lintott, copyright 2008.  They called it Sparkling Gemstones.  I changed the sewing a bit (they used strip piecing and I rarely do any more).  I have made this pattern several times, but never before with Kaffe fabric!

The border is a leftover Kaffe print from my own butterfly quilt, which is not yet finished (I'm looking for the perfect backing lol).  

Coincidentally, the backing for this Kaffe quilt is a purple print with butterflies.  I bound it with a solid purple.

So what about those black cats?

I didn't realize I had so many different black prints until I pulled them out for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  September's color is "dark", so this fits.

I freely admit I got carried away with these cat blocks.  It was fun using cat prints and matching up the black prints with the backgrounds (book print with READ fabric, Star Wars with a Star Wars background, pink and black cat fabric with Hello Kitty, etc.).

This block with the white paw prints on black is my favorite, mostly because of the kitten in the background fabric.  It looks just like my little Snicklefritz did when we brought him home from the shelter.

These black cats are going into their very own quilt.

I did get cucumbers at the Farmers Market last week, and made up 8 pints of Bread and Butter Pickles.  I feel good having these all done for the year, but it really did make the house smell like apple cider vinegar.

After we left the Farmers Market, we went to the Labyrinth Garden in Regner Park.  (Click HERE for more information and directions.)  Admission is free and it is open to the public throughout the growing season.  The labyrinth is maintained by volunteers, whose work is excellent.

I had never been to a labyrinth before, and was unsure what to expect.  It was so peaceful and quiet, walking the grassy paths.  And there were so many beautiful flowers.  I'm so glad we went, it was a very worthwhile experience.  

Our little boys got their school pictures taken last week!  These are just the proofs we will be ordering from.

Buddy is in 3rd grade!  He's looking so grown up.

Our Little Guy is starting to look like a big kid!  What is happening?  I don't feel any older!

These two are coming over later and spending the night while their parents have an evening out.  So I need to make up beds and bake some cookies.

Have a wonderful week!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

 Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy