Keep Calm and Keep Sewing!

Good morning! Here's one of the things cheering me up this week.  My orchid is coming to life again, and I bought the orange Gerbera daisy at the grocery store the last time I went.  Outside it's a typical Wisconsin spring, alternating between rainy and cold, but inside flowers are blooming.

Quilts are happening inside, too!  My dog Bella is helping me show a quilt I finished this morning.  Pam, a very talented quilter in our guild designed this as a Block of the Month, starting last February.

The blocks were based on the Friendship Star pattern.  It was like working a puzzle, putting all these blocks of different sizes together, but Pam had good directions.  She urged us to use our creativity, and I took her up on it!  All the little Friendship Star blocks are my additions.

Pam added sewing machines cut from a panel to her quilt, and I liked that so much I added one, too.  It's a hand crank, of course, a people-powered machine, although I pieced the blocks on my treadle instead of one of my hand cranks.

The fabrics in this quilt are a mix of feed sacks, vintage fabrics that are not feed sacks, and 1930s reproduction fabrics.  It was fun deciding which fabrics to use each month, although I always made a giant mess dragging out scraps and auditioning them.
I'll show you the back of the quilt next week.  There's a story there.

I made this with the scraps!  It's a bread cloth.  I bake a lot of bread, rolls, etc. even when we're not in the middle of a pandemic.  Usually I cover the rising dough with a dish towel, but I've always thought it would be nice to have a special cloth for this.  Now I do!  (By the way, in this photo the cloth is covering pizza dough for last night's supper.  The plant is basil, which smells like heaven every time I brush against it.)

The back is a flour sack from "Mother's Best" flour.

They call it "The flour with a flavor".  Wonder what the flavor was?  This bag once held 49 pounds of flour.  Because the U.S. government standardized flour quantities during World War II, we know this bag was produced before that.

Continuing with the 1930s fabrics, this month's house blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are done.  It was hard coming up with teal/turquoise/aqua fabrics that would play well together in the blocks.

I like all 3 of them, but this one is my hands-down favorite.

Now that all these projects are done, I can spend the rest of the weekend making face masks as requested by hospitals.  Goodness knows, I've got plenty of fabric to use.

I hope all of you are well, and coping with the changes we have had to make.  We are not the first generation to deal with terrible realities, and sadly we won't be the last.  We can get through this better if we work together.

However, I have nothing good to say about toilet paper hoarders.

Be safe, be strong, be well.
And happy International Quilting Day!
Cheers for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Angela at So Scrappy
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict 
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

A Very Happy Chaos

Here's why I didn't blog last week!  Isn't he a peach?  My youngest grandson was born on March 5th, and I took care of his brothers (and the dog and cat) until he and Mom and Dad came home from the hospital.  Our whole family is blessed beyond measure.

As far as quilting, nothing is finished.  After catching up around here and getting some routine doctor appointments out of the way, I'm working on several projects at once.

I did get my Text Me A Quilt blocks done for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  The color for the month is turquoise, which I don't have a lot of, but I managed to scrape these together.  Here's my next idea on how to set them.

My blocks are made with my usual novelty fabrics, and I noticed something I probably should have seen before.  Novelty fabrics often look weird cut in small pieces.

The light cats here are okay, but what about those waving cat hands?

It gets weirder.  Poor little Daniel Tiger is cut in pieces.

Believe it or not, this print has a sheep riding a bicycle.  Who could tell?

These cute little frogs are sadly sliced up.

A couple of these squares are okay, you can tell it's Sponge Bob, but you have to guess what the words were supposed to say.  (Can you guess?)

This is the worst one.  These poor swimming ladies are headless!

If I had bigger pieces of these scraps, maybe I could have fussy cut the squares so they'd come out better.  Or maybe I should just not worry about it.  It could be fun for kids to look through these silly fabrics.

In other news, this.

I'm putting the borders on this donation quilt top.  It was a kit cut by a member of our marvelous charity committee, and all the fabrics were donated (we get the most amazing donated fabric!). I got the piecing done a couple of weeks ago, but have been procrastinating on the borders.  It's so big I can't really lay it out here, I'll have to move it to another room.

I might actually get more quilting, sorting and cleaning done in the next few weeks, because I'm on "maternity leave"!  Actually, my daughter is on maternity leave from her job while she looks after her new baby, but that means my Little Buddy is home instead of here.  We "borrowed" him yesterday, partly to give his mom a break but mostly because we missed him.

Here are my little ones together, Baby Buddy and Little Buddy.
Life is very, very good.

As for the virus, let's all be safe.  Keep Calm and Wash Your Hands is my new motto.
Have a lovely week, and thanks for reading.
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Angela at So Scrappy (Home of the Rainbow Scrap Quilt Challenge)
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

Orange Orphan

Happy Leap Day, everyone!  And welcome to Treadlestitches.  It's the last day of February, of course, and it's also the end of orange month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, so it was a good time for me to finish up this little orphan block quilt.

Last year, our guild had a block of the month mystery quilt, presented by our own Pam W.  The theme was friendship, and each month, Pam would give us a block pattern variation on Friendship Star.

I started out making my blocks with vintage, feedsack, and reproduction fabrics, mostly in reds and blues.  Because this particular block pattern was handed out in October, I went nuts and made it in orange and green Halloween prints.  It did not play well with the others, so I set it aside and made another block in red and blue.  (I'm quilting that quilt now, and hope to have it done next month.)

To finish off this orange orphan block, I added a double row of 2.5 in. (cut) squares, again using vintage, feedsacks, and repro fabrics.  Some of these had come out to play recently in my house blocks.  I bound it with a solid orange from my basement "collection".

Isn't this back wild?  It's a vintage fabric, and was made into a curtain when I found it at a flea market.  I'm guessing 1930s to 1940s for when it was originally printed.

Here's the curtain.  It was sewn nicely at the top, but not hemmed, and had little or no wear.  I wonder if it was ever used.  I also wonder what it would have looked like as a curtain.  It would certainly add some color to a room.

I have this little wooden quilt hanger in my dining room, and I would like to have more quilts to hang here so I can change them out with the seasons and holidays.  When I got this quilt finished, I just couldn't wait til October to hang it up and see what it looks like.  So this is a preview.  I'll put it away now and put up some spring quilts.
Hurray, one less orphan block.
In other news:

My Little Buddy asked me to take his picture.  He's sitting in the toy dinosaurs bin, and holding one of his favorite T. Rex dinosaurs.  I want to give him lots of attention now.  He's getting a baby brother no later than next Saturday.

We were finger painting this week.  At first he would just put two blobs of paint on a page and say he was done.  We progressed to making this masterpiece together.

What do you think of this paper towel?  I really love the "quilting"!
The joy of quilting is everywhere.

I'm going to a quilt show today, the first of the season here, so I had better get going.  I'm wishing the joys of quilting for you this week--viewing, touching (only NOT at the quilt show!), and creating.
Cheers for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop
Angela at So Scrappy (Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge)
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

Cut, Sew, Quilt!

Good morning, and welcome to Treadlestitches!  I thought I'd take a picture of our snow this morning, since we might get up above freezing today.  Let the melting begin!  Really, it's not too bad for this time of year.  The driveway is clear, and the snow piles along the driveway are only about 2 feet high.

I got some feedsacks cut for the quilt show booth next Saturday--4 charm packs (with 20 squares each) and 10 fat quarters.  That handy dandy gadget in the photo is a pinker, and works like pinking shears, only with a crank.  I have used it for fabric, but I used it here just for the price labels.  My little buddy and I had some fun with it cutting up paper.

Cutting done--on to the sewing!  My Text Me A Quilt blocks are done for February.  I can't believe how much I love orange.

I'm testing out different layouts as I make the blocks.  (I'll bet you do that, too!)

I seemed to have two kinds of orange in my scraps--bright orange and a more "pumpkin-y" orange.  The print with the triangles came from a scrap I picked up on the free table at a guild meeting.

When my Little Buddy saw this block, he said, "You've got minions!"  It prompted me to imagine a roomful of these little guys waiting for my instructions to take over the world.  No thank you, not interested in world domination, but it would be great to have them for a cleaning crew.  I could pay them in bananas.

And now for a little quilting.  I've had these tractor scraps for a long time, trying to figure out what to do with them.  I finally put two kinds of farming/tractor scraps together for this little quilt.

The green strips frame squares cut from a fabric I found in an antique mall.  The red frames surround squares cut from a farm print.  The green tractors are John Deere, the red ones are Case.

I'm not sure this was the best use of color.  The red is so strong.  While each frame goes with its own block, I don't think the two colors work well together.  Oh, well.  It is what it is.

I love the tractor fabric on the border.  Good news, I have lots of it left!

The green print is from the 2018 Wisconsin Quilt Shop Hop, and is just the names of Wisconsin towns and cities with quilt shops in the hop.  My local shop is in Richfield.

I think I like the back better than the front!  This John Deere fabric was sent to me by Beth, a generous blog reader.  Thanks, Beth!
This little tractor quilt measures 36 in. x 36 in., and so would be suitable for Jack's Basket.  I'm going to think about it a little while.  With all the Wisconsin connections here, it might need to be donated to someone local.
I hope you're having a lovely day today.  And every day!
Thanks for reading.

Linking up with:
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Angela at So Scrappy
Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop
Cynthia at Oh Scrap