Rainbow Dugout Quilt, Pink Bowties, and Happy 2025

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

I made a LOT of quilt blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge in 2024.  It might take me all this year to finish them up!  Technically I finished this quilt last weekend, before the New Year.

I was calling these "Stretched Stars" blocks, but it turns out my measurements were off slightly and they didn't really line up to make stars.  (Click HERE for that post.)  They work fine set like this, though.

I got the idea for this arrangement from these books by the late great Mary Ellen Hopkins, quilting pioneer and rotary cutting genius.  The amazing It's Okay If You Sit On My Quilt Book was a groundbreaker in 1982 when it was first published.  The quilting world was changed forever by the invention of the rotary cutter, and Mary Ellen showed us so many ways to use what she called a "whizzywhacker".

If you've never seen these books before, I recommend looking for them in your library or used book store.  There are so many ideas in here.  Mary Ellen's mind must have been going 80 mph all the time.

And those blocks I made last year?  She called them Dugout blocks, because they could be used to make a block called Kansas Dugout.  The books will be inspirational as I finish up the rest of the blocks.

My blocks finish at 4.5 in., and there are 56 of them in the quilt.  I added a striped border and some simple quilting.

The back is this fun dotted print, and I bound with purple.  The quilt will be donated locally.

It's a new Rainbow Scrap Challenge year.  Have you started yet?  January's color of the month is pink.  This year I'm starting my blocks with these bundles of small remnants I'm calling Big Scraps.  The goal is to make some room in the overflowing bushel basket while making this year's blocks.

 

First up:  8 in. finished Bowties.

Check out the dinosaur fabric!  A friend gave it to me.  Do you see the date?  1993!  It's 100% cotton  decent quality fabric, and still useful even after all these years.

January is also Community Baby Shower month here in the Milwaukee area.  I like making flannel quilts for babies, especially when it's so cold outside.  This stack of squares will be a pink and white Trip Around the World.  I've got a few others in the mix as well.

My young grandsons were here all day most of last week while school is out for Christmas break.  We went to the library on Monday, and found this cool igloo, made of old milk jugs.  

They also had fun with the puppet theater before finding fun books to take home.  Germantown Community Library is awesome!

The start of a new year is a great time to reevaluate all sorts of things, including our hobbies.  But I'm not going to make any hard and fast New Year's Resolutions.  I just want to make scraps into quilts for people who need them.  That's the plan!

Have a lovely week, and thanks for reading!

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

I love reading quilt blogs!  Check out these friendly creative bloggers at the following link parties:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Pink!

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's been a very strange start to 2021.  Thank goodness for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, to help us keep our hopes up and focus on something besides the horrors in the news.

I have often whined about not liking pink.  So where did all these pink scraps come from?  No matter, they have to get used up, and sewing these blocks is so much fun.

These are 6 in. finished blocks:  friendship star, plus blocks (aka ninepatch), and crumb hearts.  There is a temptation to call them "broken" hearts because of all the little pieces, but I'd rather think of them as Patchwork hearts, full of all kinds of things to love.

But wait, there's more!

These little blocks have a 2.5 in. cut square for the center and 2.5 x 4.5 in. rectangles around it.  The secret to making them like this is using a partial seam for the first seam.  Easy, and uses up 2.5 in. strips and squares.

Now for the 8 in. finished blocks!

I'm making Happy Blocks, with 4.5 in. cut centers and 2.5 in. cut strips around them.  (Click HERE for the tutorial.)  I'm cutting the centers from fun prints, mostly my favorite novelties.  The stars have 4 patch centers made from 2.5 in. squares, with the star points and backgrounds cut from 2.5 in. strips.

Also, this.

Ice cream cones!  I was inspired to make these by reading the Making a Lather blog, by Maggie Fellow.  (She makes so many great scrap quilts!) I looked at several patterns on the internet, and finally just decided to figure it out myself.  The cone part is cut with the Tri-Rex rulers, and the top is a 4.5 in. cut square with little background corners to sort of round out the ice cream.  The background is a dessert print, with cake and cupcakes and ice cream.  I will see how many blocks I can get out of it before I have to switch to another background.

Quilters, I know what you're thinking, and you're right.  This is a lot of projects!  But I do have a plan.  

One of my greatest joys is making quilts for babies and children.  They are donated to good causes, like kids in foster care or hospitals, or to families welcoming a child with Down's Syndrome.  This year, I'm making blocks for those quilts as I participate in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  When we come to the end of the year, I will have enough blocks to make a nice stack of quilts to give away.  (There won't be pink blocks in every quilt though, since many charities request gender-neutral quilts.)

And about pink--I'm finding that I actually like it!

I think I know where some of the pink scraps came from.  For years, it was my granddaughter's favorite color, and I made her a few things with it.  Miss E. is a joy, and it was so good to see her at our social distanced holiday party last weekend.  In the photo above, she's wearing a mask, and playing with slime she got for Christmas.  Little Buddy thinks slime is the greatest thing ever.  Little Buddy, who is 4, and Baby Buddy (now 10 months) were the only ones not wearing masks for the lunch-and-presents party.

I hope you're feeling "in the pink" today, and ready to take on the challenges of this new year. Let's keep planning, keep hoping, keep looking ahead to a better future.

And let's eat ice cream!

Cheers for reading this!

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Angela at So Scrappy

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday 

Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop

Cynthia at Oh Scrap