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

 

Summertime Blues (and Aqua)

Welcome to Treadlestitches! 

Is it summer where you live?  Here in Wisconsin, you can't get much more "summer" than yesterday, the 4th of July.  Happy Independence Day, America!

Hanging on the clothesline today is a child's quilt, 36 in. x 42 in., freshly finished and ready to give away.

All sorts of bugs and other creepy crawlies are enjoying the good here weather too. Even on the border of the quilt!  The bug print came from a rummage sale last summer.  The colorful scraps all came from the box of 2.5 in. x 3.5 in. rectangles.  I used 90 of them in the blocks, and probably still have enough to make 2 more quilts.  Scraps are forever lol.

I don't know an official name for this block.  (If you do, please tell me!)  I call the 2.5 in. x 3.5 in. rectangles Little Bricks, so I named this block Little Bricks Ladder.  I'm hoping there's a cooler name somewhere in quilt blog land.  The three bricks are sewn together, and then 2 in. x 6.5 in. white strips are sewn on each long side.  Easy peasy.

Here's the back, made of two different light prints.  I'm trying not to be so fussy about the backs, I just need to use up what I've already got, and both these prints are cute.  Kids are probably not going to care about this anyway.  The quilting is a 3 in. grid in serpentine stitch.
 

Now that it's July, I have finally caught up with June's Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month.  These are my 1800s repro hexagons.  I absolutely adore indigo blue, and it's getting harder to find it in stores.
 

What if I added in the red ones for a patriotic look?  Hey, this would make a great quilt!  But I've already got mine planned to include ALL the colors.  I didn't start this project at the beginning of the year, so I'm catching up on the RSC colors I missed.  I don't think I'll have many hexagons in aqua for July, it's an unusual color for reproduction fabrics, but I'll hunt out what I have.

Aqua kid prints aren't hard to find!  Some of these are old favorites, and a few of them came as ready-cut charm squares from the big museum sale last month.  I'm going to need a lot of these stretched star blocks per quilt since they're small, only 4.5 in. finished.

Speaking of aqua, check out this vintage quilt I saw at a flea market last Sunday.  Star blocks with a pink background alternate with aqua blocks with pink centers.  I always love looking at antique quilts.  Frequently you see things you've never seen before.

It's been fun having the grand kids around more this summer.  Here's Buddy, just hanging around.  Hang on, Buddy!  He had to hold the pose while waiting for me to take the photo, and I was kind of slow.  He's not angry, just straining to hold on.  Sorry, Buddy.
 

Our black raspberries are ripe, and the little boys love picking and eating them, which is what Little Guy is doing here.  We have also had lots for eating on cereal, etc., and a few pints for the freezer.  Snicky the cat wants to go out whenever we do, so he's learning to walk on a leash.  Or maybe I'm learning to go wherever he wants to go.  But we will not be chasing any birds or rabbits!

And you know where I want to go--the sewing room!  I'm getting some sewing time in this long weekend, but there are errands and other jobs to do, too.  

I hope you have a happy peaceful week ahead, and some time to do the things you love to do.

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

Cats and Dogs and Elephants, Oh My

Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Hey!  Who's under this quilt?  I just finished it this morning!

Oh yeah, I forgot, Snicky has a side job as a quilt quality control inspector.  That is of course in addition to his regular jobs of holding down our laps and waking us up at 5:00 a.m.  He's a busy guy.
 

I got carried away making these Uneven Nine Patch blocks last year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  This is the second small quilt from these, and it uses 30 blocks.  The first quilt used 20.  There are still 51 more blocks!  What on earth was I thinking?

All of the blocks I chose for this quilt have animal prints in the center square.  There are pets, like cats and dogs and rabbits, zoo animals, farm animals, insects, birds, fish, dinosaurs, and sea mammals.  The blocks alternate dark and light centers. 

There are even animals on the back!  You might recognize this as "country look" fabric from the 1980s/1990s.  It's good cotton fabric, and I'm happy to have found a use for it.

Now I'll get the quilt washed and donated to a children's charity.  And then figure out what to do with the rest of the blocks.

The RSC color for June is blue (any blue!) which is great for me because I have so many blue scraps.  I'm just getting started making June's blocks, but these 3-D flying geese are easy and fast so I did them first.

Catch up is still happening with pink blocks.  I didn't have very many pink crumbs, so I only made two of these strips sewn on grocery receipts.

I may not be a big fan of regular pink fabric (yet?), but I have always loved double pink reproduction prints.  These hexies and triangles are cut with the Accuquilt cutter and are fast to sew.  I'm starting to get anxious to see all the colors together in the quilt, with those white stars peeking out.

A couple of months ago, a lovely lady (who used to be my son's English teacher) contacted our quilt guild about a local charity called Ebony Vision.  They have mentoring programs and a free lending library, with special activities for children. (Click HERE for an article about the organization.) Of course that caught my attention as I'm a retired school librarian.  We made a couple of quilts for them to use as a fund raiser, and now we're making book pillows.  The pillow covers (as seen above) have a deep pocket for books, lapped back flaps for easy insert and removal of the pillow, and a handle for carrying.

Our goal is 40 pillow covers done by our next meeting.  The pillows to go inside have already been purchased.  I couldn't attend the sewing day at the guild, but the amazing Colleen dropped off two kits plus instructions.  Those are the blue and green ones.  I also made the other two from guild fabric plus my fabric.

I had to include this red fabric with dinos and books!

There was some non-sewing activity here this week.  Little Guy "graduated" from preschool!  With all the excitement we couldn't get him to hold up the certificate for the photo, but it was such fun seeing the program the kids put on, with lots of happy singing. 

All the kids told the teachers what they wanted to be when they grew up.  

Here's what Little Guy said:

Those big trucks are really exciting.  Plus the man who collects the garbage in our neighborhood is very friendly, so maybe that's what influenced his choice.  I just want him to be happy in his work, whatever it is.

Have a happy start to a new month, with time for things you love to do.

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