In Praise of Purple

It's purple month!  The color for September for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is purple.

What an amazing color!  It's an exciting range from pale lavender to deep dark grape.

What kinds of things besides flowers are purple?  We found a purple cow at the Linden Sculpture Garden in Mequon, Wisconsin.  (Little Buddy is not really feeding it.)

Sometimes green beans aren't green at all.   I am amazed at all the beautiful colors of the vegetables at the farmers market.

These are my purple quilt blocks this week, two spiky stars.

I make these stars with reproduction fabrics, and I really didn't have very many purple scraps.  So I used whatever I had, and only made two blocks.

The center of this block is the very last scrap of this purple stripe.  It doesn't exactly match the spiky points, but I don't care, I just like it.  When it's done, I'll run my hands over it and remember where it came from.
As you can probably tell, these blocks are not just pieced, they are quilted.  All along, I have been making blocks in the RSC color of the month and quilting them.  Soon I'll be ready to start putting them together with sashings and cornerstones and borders.
I absolutely LOVE quilting by the block.  It is so fast!  It only took half an hour to do both of these.

This is what the back looks like.  As you can see, the quilting is very simple.  I do it in one continuous line, without breaking the thread.
I cut my pieces of batting and backing a little differently than most people (I'm just like that.)
The blocks are 12.5 in. unfinished.  I cut the batting squares 12 in., so there is no batting in the seam.  This makes the seam lie flatter.  Then I cut the backing squares to 13.5 in.  It gives me a little more fabric to work with when I do the hand stitching after the sashings are added.

Soon the weather will turn, here in Wisconsin.  The flowers will be gone again, only to reappear in spring.
In the meantime, we'll enjoy the color in our quilts.

I'm wishing colorful fabrics and quilts for you this week, either making or appreciating.
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict
Alycia at Alycia Quilts
Angela at So Scrappy
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

Exchanging Gifts

I have an actual finished quilt this week!

Okay, it's SMALL, but it's a Feathered Star, so that should count for something, right?  I made this for our local guild's annual gift exchange.  We call it the Brown Bag Challenge.  Each participant puts a fat quarter and a slip of paper with their name on it in a bag (brown or otherwise), and then chooses someone else's bag.  Then you make something with the fat quarter, and give it to the original owner at Christmas.

I got Mary L.'s bag.  Her fabric is the beautiful purple print, in the center and the points.
Long years ago, probably in the late 1980s, I took a class from Marsha McCloskey, the queen of feathered stars, and made a small quilt like this and a few more blocks.  In those days, we used rotary cutting for some of the pieces, but most of them were cut with templates.  I have no patience for templates anymore, so I wanted to find a pattern that was all rotary cut.
Here it is:  FEATHERED STAR TUTORIAL.  It's a PDF, and it's long (about 38 pages), but so worth it!  Molly, the author, takes you through each step with examples and lots of encouragement.  I would definitely recommend it.

Here's the back of the little quilt.  I used some wonderful dragon fabric I've had for years.  The designer's inspiration was an old English children's book called The Reluctant Dragon, which I love.  Some of this fabric made it into my Children's Library Quilt (which is still waiting to be quilted).
Wanna see what I got?

Mary L. had my name!  She made this lovely lap quilt.  Aren't the colors wonderful?

My fabric was this purple stripe.  I had completely forgotten which fat quarter I had put in the bag. (I pretty much do that every year, sadly.)

Check out the quilting!

And this back is absolutely beautiful.  I've been leaning this way for a while, but this clinches it.  Purple is my new favorite color.  Thank you, thank you, Mary L.!
Naturally, with the Christmas season, I've been thinking about gifts for weeks.  Just yesterday we finally finished our shopping for the grandchildren, and a week from tomorrow we'll all get together for food and fun and presents.
But I've also been thinking about other kinds of gifts.  Like the gift I'm getting today when my daughters and their children come to make Christmas cookies.  Or the gift of a Christmas card in the mail (especially the ones with photos!) or a hug from a friend.  The older I get, the more these things matter, and the less I worry about giving the perfect gift from the store.
Love is what matters.  It is, after all, the reason for the season.
Enjoy this week, if you can.  It's a gift!
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up as usual with Crazy Mom Quilts and Busy Hands Quilts.  Come and see what everybody is making!