Rainbows and Blue Skies

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Here's my small Rainbow Rails quilt, finished just in time for Pride Month, and hanging out on my front porch.

I got the pattern from American Patchwork & Quilting magazine, issue #188, seen above.  Of course I didn't make it exactly the way the pattern says (do I ever?) but it was great inspiration.  Plus it used up lots of my light/low volume strips and solid colored strips.

How do you like this artistic swirl?  It's brought to you by Snicky the cat, almost seen here in the middle.

It was fun putting all these light prints in one quilt.  They usually get to be the backgrounds, hardly ever the starring roles.

The back is this Kim Schaefer fabric with lots of cute short words.  I finished up with a rainbow binding of more leftover strips.

Blue month at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is nearly half over!  Yikes, time goes so fast!

Some blue rail fence blocks got sewn up.  I'm enjoying using both light and dark blues this month, it worked out well in these blocks.

These strips sewn on grocery receipts use all kinds of blue crumbs.  I have WAY more dark blue scraps than light blue, so I just mixed some light blue pieces in the dark blue strips and made one with just light blues.  Still not sure what I'm making with these.  Hope I figure it out by the end of the year!

So, this happened!  Again!  It was the big annual sale at the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts.  Fellow quilters, you would have loved it!  I stocked up, as I guess you can see.  The column on the left is flannel, the rest are regular cottons.  It took me all day yesterday to wash and fold it all.

In the last several years, I have found that I really like buying and using second hand fabric in my quilts.  For one thing, it is SO much cheaper, which I appreciate since I'm giving away 90% of the quilts I make.  Also, it's like a treasure hunt finding kid-friendly fabric at flea markets, yard sales, etc., and I love when I find good pieces and "rescue" them.  It's recycling, right?

I'm going to try something new.  From June 2024 (now) to June 2025, I'm making it my mission to use mostly second hand fabric.  (It's not like I don't have any, lol!)  If I need to buy any new fabric, it will just be what I need for a specific project.  No stash building at the quilt store.  Wish me luck!

In other news, we had a perfect day at the ball park.  Hubby and I joined our eldest daughter, son-in-law, grandson and granddaughter at Sunday's Kenosha Kingfish game.  It was so much fun.

Even better than the game was the pregame show by this wonderful gymnastics group.  Our lovely and talented granddaughter Miss E. is on the far left as they're warming up.

Our weather here has been lovely, and we appreciate it so much after our cold winters.  I'm going to get a glass of iced tea and sit out on the porch.

Have a lovely week!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

This Pieceful Life

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

How are your projects coming along?  For me, I have nothing finished this week, but some progress has been made.  Sometimes that's the best you can say!

Pink rail fence blocks will be handy when making up Rainbow Scrap Challenge baby quilts at the end of the year.  The pink 2.5 in. strips are almost gone.  (Is that a good thing?)

The butterfly quilt I'm making from an unknown quilter's UFO is almost a top!  I need to add the pieced border of half square triangles and the outer border from the vintage blue print.

Rainbow Rails is coming along as my leader and ender project.  For my version, I need nearly 100 of these little blocks.  I'm up to 62.
 

I was gone for a week to visit my mom, and we had out of town company this week, so I'm behind on everything, but it was totally worth it seeing people we love.

Maybe I'd get something finished if these pesky squirrels didn't keep popping up!

Now you see it, now you don't!  Watch out, this nine patch block is going to disappear. 

Ta da!  Now it's four blocks, complete with sashing and cornerstones.  I'm following the Self Sashing Nine Patch Quilt Tutorial from Jo Kramer at Jo's Country Junction blog. 

It's a good pattern for using up some random charm squares and other pink scraps.  I wish I had more of this cute puppy print.
 

Oops!  I did discover a problem that can happen if you use novelty prints, which are often one-way designs.  Upside down unicorns look kind of weird.  I fixed this with the seam ripper, but it can be avoided by placing the novelty square in the upper left corner of the nine patch block.

There has been a lot of traffic through our backyard in the early morning.  One day this week we saw a mother mallard with 13 baby ducks (we counted!) walk right across our patio.  Today there was a hen turkey, just sauntering along.  Two robins are fighting (or mating?) almost every day.  And I have no photos of any of it sadly.  Spring is wild around here.

I was so glad to see this Little Guy and his big brother when I got back.  We've had some thunder storms and cooler days, but also warm days just right for playing outside and popsicle parties on the porch.

So how are your projects coming along?  I look forward to seeing all the wonderful quilting at the linky parties below.  Have a wonderful week, and Happy Mothers Day to all the American moms.

Cheers,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

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