Panel Pieces, Happy Blocks, and Bowties

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Thanks for stopping by!

  Yes, it's another Happy Blocks quilt this week.  I've actually lost track of how many of these I've made.  It's such a fun and easy design for a child's quilt.  This time it's a little different, because the centers are made from panel pieces.

Are you wondering what I mean by panel pieces?  Or do you also have a bag like this, full of off cuts and scraps of panels and striped fabric?  I was thinking about this bag after a conversation with my friend Joey brought up a stray thought.  What if I cut squares from the panel scraps and bordered them with solid colors?

I chose pieces from the bag that had similarly sized motifs and similar colors, in this case bright rather than pastel.  This animals panel was one of them.

This elephant came from that panel.  (Please excuse the loose thread I somehow didn't see when I snapped the photo!)

There were also a few striped pieces I could cut into squares.  This one had birds and butterflies and bugs and bees.

Here's how it turned out.

Two of my favorite panels/stripes got cut up before I thought of taking photos.  I love this cute little tiger and all his friends.  Even the snake.  The orange is brighter in person.

The tiger face in the aqua square was one of six animals in a panel scrap.  I'm not even sure where it came from.  I used all six.  I think kids will like them.

The blocks are 8 in. finished.  I'm not planning on adding a border, so the quilt will finish at 40 in. x 48 in.  I'm going to quilt this one myself and donate it to Project Linus locally.

Yellow month marches on lol.  I have loved making these big Bowtie blocks.

I had more fun yellow prints that I thought I did!

The dog square is my favorite.

I hope I'll have time to finish my yellow blocks this week, but I've started a big project that's taking a lot of time.  I'm doing a basement clean out of my quilting stuff.  This week it was the flannel fabric.  Above is a big bin with flannel pieces big enough for backing.  I've arranged them like this so I can open the lid and see just what I have.  (Thanks to Marie Kondo for the idea.)

Smaller pieces of flannels are arranged in these bins.  The small ones on the top hold strips and squares.  The rest are arranged by color within sizes of small, medium, and large.  I love seeing these bright prints, and I'm hoping it will inspire me to use them up.

This stack is less pretty.  More cut pieces on top, solid colored flannel in the blue bin, and scraps and larger strips in the green one.  Organized, and ready to use.  It feels good!

The cats are trying to "help" me.  Lizzie is inspecting a pile of wool fabric I'm re-homing.

Snicky worked so hard he had to go take a nap.

Yesterday I took Little Guy to the doctor.  He's had a cold and needed some meds for a potential ear infection.  It was the first time he ever wore a mask.  I thought he was cute, but he was not a fan.  I had to bribe him with Pokemon time to get him to keep it on.

Everyone with colds is on the mend, the weather is getting nicer, and spring break for my youngest grandsons is next week.  We're hoping good times will be had by all.

Including you!  Have a wonderful week!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with these lovely ladies and their linky parties.  Come join us!

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

 

ABCs and Summer Fun

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Even though school is out here for the summer, we still need to remember our ABCs!  This week I finished a little panel quilt as a donation to Quilts for Kids.  (Shown here with my black raspberry vines.  Can't wait for next month's harvest!)

I bought the panel at my local quilt shop.  It caught my eye because it was really colorful and cute.  The squares are printed, but I outline quilted them as though they were pieced.

The center of the quilt, including the solid red inner border, was the original panel.  I added a strip of light blue alphabet blocks print on each side to make it wider, and then added the red print border.

I stuck with the theme on the back, using an older print I've had in the Endless Stash for a while.  I bought it second hand, I think it was originally printed in the 1980s or 1990s.
 

By the time I got to the border, I ran out of ABC prints, so this turtle and butterfly/dragonfly one had to do.  The light blue binding is probably from the 1980s.  Hey, light blue for June's color in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge!  And another scrap used up.

Speaking of the RSC, this week's blocks are the Uneven Nine Patch blocks AKA Puss in the Corner.

I'm making half of them with dark centers and half with light.  They'll be alternated in the eventual quilts, but will be mixed up with all the other colors.

More cute fabrics keep turning up!  It's hard to stop making the blocks.

We're spending so much more time outside now that it's summer!  The little boys have lots of energy to run off.

Buddy posed for this picture.  He loves zooming past on the scooter.

Remember this rainbow xylophone square on the panel quilt?

Here it is in real life--with Little Guy playing the notes.  It's on the playground at the neighborhood elementary school.

Last week when we left the library, Buddy was telling me how much he loves going there, and I had a hard time not crying tears of joy.  Our library is terrific!  There are books on whatever you're currently obsessed with, from Thomas the Tank Engine (Little Guy) to Tornadoes and Turkey hunting (Buddy), and just fun stuff like Here Comes the Big Mean Dust Bunny! Plus a great summer reading program every year, and kind friendly people to assist us.  Support Your Local Library!

Have a great week ahead, everybody!  I hope it includes time for all the things you love to do.

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

 

 

 

 

Roar!

We're roaring around here today...

and stomping, too!

My Little Buddy's dinosaur quilt is finished!  Some of his favorite friends are helping me.

They're pretty excited, and I am, too.  I can't wait to show Little Buddy the quilt when he comes here on Tuesday.

Here's the whole thing, without the dinosaur friends.  All of the smaller squares were charm squares, either the official kind from the quilt store, or cut by me from my scraps.

Here's the panel I started with back in June.  It took a little bit of math to figure out the layout so everything would fit.  Math makes my head hurt, but I persisted.

I framed up the center to a size that would work with the charm squares.  Those dark blue squares in the corners were cut from a yard of fabric that was meant to go with the panel.  I was really glad I bought it.
The last border is really wide, because I wanted to put the smaller squares from the panel in the corners.
I did the quilting on my domestic machine, quilt as you go style.  It might be easier to see what I mean by looking at the back.

The center section is what I quilted first, just as though it was a small quilt.  Then I added the large outer pieces of backing to the center.  I spray basted large strips of batting to the backing.  Then I added the borders to the top, one border at a time, spray basting the batting as I went.  I would add a border, quilt it, then add the next, and quilt it, and so on.

All of the quilting is very simple stuff.  I did use Golden Threads paper to mark the wavy lines.
It was a relatively easy way to quilt a medallion style quilt.  Best of all, no hand sewing!

So that's one off the To Do list.
Here's something I'm sewing as a leader and ender project.  Does anybody know the name of this pattern?

Here's one block, made with rectangles and squares 2.5 in. wide (cut).

And here's what they can do when you put 4 blocks together!
I just love patterns like this.
I picked up this kit at our last quilt meeting.  Our wonderful charity group had cut all the pieces from donated scraps.  When I finish the piecing, a volunteer will quilt it on a long arm machine, and we'll donate it locally to a good cause.
I would love to know the name of the pattern and the designer if possible.

Thanks for reading this long post.  I'm hoping you have something great to roar about this week.
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Angela at So Scrappy (Keep her in your thoughts--the hurricane is coming her way!)
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict
Alycia at Alycia Quilts
Cynthia at Oh Scrap