Pink Flannel, Rainbows, Hearts, and Bonus Blocks

Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Can you tell it's pink month?

Yes, it is definitely pink month at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for January.  I apologize for the indoor-only photos, but it was snowing here today.  So I hung this pink flannel scrap quilt on the closet door in the guest room where it's warm and dry to snap a few pictures.

This is one of the kits I cut last year when I was straightening up my flannel stash.  It's a 4 patch, as you can see. The alternate unpieced block is a rainbow print.  

I quilted a 3 in. grid in the main section.  It was easy to do that with the 4 patches by following the center seams, but I had to sew right down the middle of the 6 in. alternate blocks in both directions.  I've marked this before with a quilting marker, but I wanted to try something else.

This is a Hera marker.  The name is kind of misleading, because it doesn't really make any "marks".  You use the curved end to crease the fabric, and quilt it while you can still see the crease.  The big advantage is not having any marks on the quilt to wash out or erase.

I've had a Hera marker for a long time but never really used it.  This little flannel quilt seemed like a good place to try it out.  I used it with a ruler as a straight-edge, and it worked great.  The creases  showed up well on the soft flannel.  I'm really happy with it.

Here's the back, diaper pin print flannel!  Does anybody remember diaper pins?  I used cloth diapers with my babies in the late 1970s-early 1980s and pinned them on with this kind of big pin.  (There's a trick to it to keep from sticking the baby.)  Once disposable diapers became readily available, cloth diapers and diaper pins were used less and less.  I wonder if young moms today even know what they are!

Trying to decide which blocks to make all year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is hard:  there are so many great blocks!  I have 8 in. Bowties already, and now I'm adding 6 in. Hearts.  They're fun and easy to make, plus they mix well with other blocks.

This heart is made of a heart print!  With a side of rainbows.

I'm making the blocks like this, with "flippy corners".  

When these big pieces are cut off, I sew them into HSTs, and trim them to 2.5 in. square.

For every heart block, I also get 2 bonus HSTs.

I'm adding two squares from the 2.5 in. square drawer to the 2 triangle squares to make these little blocks.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet.

I might put 4 of them together and make star blocks.

Or maybe something completely different!

Our youngest grandsons were back in school this week, but last week they spent some time with us.  One day we went to an indoor playground, and they absolutely loved it.

This giant slide was one of their favorite things.  I never could get a good picture.  They were going so fast they were just blurs.

The weeks seem to fly by like that too.  Just an exciting, happy blur.

I hope we all can enjoy the good times while they're whirling by.

Have a lovely week, everyone.

Cheers for reading this,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at SoScrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

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

A Happy New Year

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Happy New Year!

The hardest thing about blogging for me is coming up with titles for my posts!  This week it was easy:  I took the title from this postcard.

One hundred and thirteen years ago, in 1911, my great grandmother sent this New Years card to her mother and father, my great great grandparents.  Here's the text of it:

Dear parents:  Thought I would send you a card telling you the mine buildings partly burned last night.  How is Pearl's foot?  Will and Richard aren't well.  

Bessie

Bessie turned 21 years old on December 28, the day before the card was posted.  She and her husband Will Risley had been married for 2 1/2 years, and their son Richard (my grandfather) was about 18 months old.  Pearl was Bessie's younger sister, 15 years old at the time.

Communication in rural Indiana was so different then than it is now.  It's unlikely that either family had a telephone, so letters and postcards were very important for sharing local news and family concerns.

Bessie was a quilter, and I am lucky enough to have some of her quilts.  I wonder if she sewed to keep her worries over Will and Richard and Pearl in check, or if she even had time with a sick toddler and husband to look after.

We had a lovely Christmas celebration this week, with food and presents and games.  And of course, the obligatory group photo.

Our oldest daughter made us some new picture ornaments for our tree.  The top two are her children, Mr. H and Miss E.  (Mr. H has since decided to cut his hair and looks much older.)  Somehow we didn't have an ornament with Little Guy's photo, so my daughter made one for him too.  Picture ornaments are always my favorites, even if they become tattered.

In spite of all the festivities, I actually finished a quilt!  That's because all I had to do was bind it lol, and I did that completely by machine.

The quilt was a Block of the Month by Barbara Brackman called Antebellum Album, which celebrated signature quilts made in the 1840s and 1850s by school girls, North and South.  It is free, and is still available online (Click HERE).

This was the first block, called Wandering Lover.  I started the quilt in late January 2018.  

It's not meant to be a Christmas quilt.  Red and green were very fashionable colors for quilts in this time period, and I had lots of the reproduction prints in my stash.

My friend Joey Mahieu quilted this one for me recently.  The main blocks have these wonderful feathered circles quilted on them, which were placed perfectly, as you can see in this block.  Ms. Brackman encouraged participants to write and draw in permanent ink on our blocks.  On this one, I wrote May the Circle Be Unbroken.

You can see more of Joey's beautiful quilting in the feathered border.  I love running my hands over it.

The backing is a wide back from Connecting Threads.  The binding is a green print that is also in the top.

I'm keeping this one, and I'll probably bring it out at Christmas just because of the colors.

Are you thinking about the upcoming New Year?  I'm trying to decide what to make for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks.  

This is a problem I need to tackle.  It's my "Big Scraps" basket.  I define Big Scraps as those at least 6 in. wide but smaller than a fat quarter.  As I get big scraps, I bundle them up by color and stuff them into this bushel basket until needed.  I'm sure you tell it's getting out of hand.

This year I'm going to concentrate on using these big scraps to make RSC quilts.  I wonder how many quilts I can get out of this basket?

Now for something completely silly.

I bought a little waffle maker!  It was an impulse buy, for sure.  I was walking by it in the store.  It was adorable, and made cute little 4 in. waffles.  Not even expensive.  And they had purple ones!  It practically hopped in the cart.

Following the directions carefully, I made little waffles this morning, and they came out great!  The young grandsons will be here several days next week.  We'll see if they like waffles.

This year is coming to a close in just a few days.  As always, 2024 was a mix of good and bad times, joy and heartache.  Next year will probably be the same.  The joys make it worthwhile and help us weather the bad times.

I'm wishing joy for you in the coming week, and all next year.  Happy New Year!

Thanks 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

  

Purple Butterflies

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Today I have two quilts to show.  

First, the small quilt for donation, which is also a Rainbow Scrap Challenge project.  I made DOZENS of string blocks this year, and this is only the second quilt.

Lots of skinny strips and triangles make up these blocks.  I always feel thrifty when making them.  Can you spot the purple butterfly print?

The border is a different purple butterfly print.  Years ago I bought a bag of fabric at Goodwill, and there were SIX YARDS of this fabric in it.  I have loved using it.  It goes with most of the colors of the string blocks.

I've pinned up the back here to show you.  I bought this cotton fabric at the Winter Quilt Show a few years ago.  It cost $2 for a 2 yard piece.  Great, right?  But there was a problem.

These Easter theme borders were on either side of the dots.  They might have looked a little weird sideways on the quilt, so I cut them off.  (Don't worry, I'll find a use for them.)  The resulting dot print was narrow, but I pieced it to make it wide enough.  For quilting I did diagonal lines through the blocks.  The binding is a scrap of solid lavender.

So that's quilt #1, one of my usual small quilts for kids.  The next one is different.

This is officially a UFO.  And it has kind of a long story.

My niece Jenny died in August of 2021 from a massive aneurism at the age of 39.  Butterflies were her favorite thing, and purple/lavender was her favorite color.  I started making this quilt that fall, with the plan to give it to my sister as a comfort quilt.  I found this pieced butterfly pattern/tutorial online (click HERE), and started making blocks from Kaffe Fassett fabrics and light prints from my stash.

I had all the blocks made and the border (also a Kaffe print) ordered when my sister died in May of 2022.  For a while I couldn't even look at them.  I set the project aside.  What was I going to do with it now?  I didn't think it would be a good fit for her husband or her son.

In time, I decided to finish the quilt as a comfort quilt for me.  My friend Joey Mahieu is a professional quilter, and she quilted it for me.  I picked it up the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Can you see the hearts and swirls in the quilting?  Joey did a wonderful job (as always!).

This week I bound it.  The backing is a soft flannel, and Snicky the cat loved it so much he wouldn't let me sew!  I had to wait until he left the room.

I can't wait to snuggle up under the quilt after the Christmas quilts are put away.

Speaking of Christmas, it's almost here!  This week Little Guy had his program at school.  You can probably tell he loved it!  We loved it too.

The snow this week feels very seasonally appropriate. We will probably get lots more after the holidays, this is winter in Wisconsin, after all.
 

Tomorrow I'll be baking cookies with my daughters and grandchildren.  Icing and sprinkles and sugar, oh my!  

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!  And happy quilting to everyone!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap