Rainbow Kitties, Scraps, and Fall Fun

Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Thanks for stopping by.

Isn't it fun putting our Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks together at last?  All year long I have loved making these cat blocks, and now they get to be a rainbow.

The border is this cat print.  More rainbow kitties!  The quilting is my usual squiggle in a 3 in. grid.

I set the cats in an odd staggered set.  It's fun to do something a little different.

Here's the back, a rainbow of hearts in flannel.  It should be warm and cozy this winter for a little child.  Hope it goes to someone who loves cats!

It seems odd not to be making more RSC blocks, but we'll start again in January, and in the meantime I can catch up on some other projects.  This quilt top was a quilt group challenge issued back in June (I think).  The Amazing Margaret designed this quilt, gave us a very professional-looking written pattern with multiple sizes, and asked us to use up some of the guild's large supply of brown fabric.  We could add our own fabrics also.  

Finished tops were due at the August guild meeting, where the members would choose the top 3 for "fabulous prizes".  I didn't attend that meeting due to a mild illness, and almost forgot about these pieces I had cut and set aside.  It didn't take long to finish once I pulled it out.  

The pattern is great, just squares in 3 sizes, pieced in 8 small sections.  It was a good chance to use up some leaf prints etc. I had on hand, and I love fall colors.  The top will be quilted by our wonderful long arm quilters and donated to a local charity.

Speaking of the quilt guild, look what happened to me yesterday!  A large stock of scrap fabric was donated to the guild, and the charity committee asked if I'd take on the kid/novelty prints.  Of course I said yes!  There is some very cute stuff in this pile.

Here's what it looked like after being washed.  The pile on the left are pieces cut off the bigger scraps, because ...

...many of the pieces had been used to fussy cut squares and/or rectangles.  I cut off the dangling pieces so they would go through the wash better, and now I have a lovely scrap pile to trim up.  These will be fun pieces for new quilts to donate.

We had lots of fall fun yesterday with our youngest grandsons.  There was no school, so we got to have them all day.

They posed with Grandpa at the apple orchard.  Little guy is extra excited.

They loved the corn maze.  Buddy was confident we'd find the way out, but Little Guy wasn't so sure.

We bought four different kinds of apples, and had a taste test after we got home.  Buddy liked Macintosh best, Hubby loves Fuji and Honey Crisp, and Little Guy liked all except the Fuji.  I love them ALL.

After lunch, we made and decorated Halloween cookies.  Some of the decorations may have been eaten along the way.

This is Little Guy's artwork.  Did you guess the cookie is an apple shape, underneath all the icing and sprinkles?

This ghost is Buddy's masterpiece.  She is apparently Hawaiian, as he said she was wearing a "flower necklace" (lei?).  He also made a Pumpkin Ninja, but I was too late to get a photo.  We sent them home with lots of cookies for their parents.

I hope you have lots of fun this week, quilty and otherwise, no matter what season it is where you live!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Check our these wonderful quilt blogs, run by generous and kind quilters, who let us all link up with them!

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

Kid Quilt and More Multicolor Blocks

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

This little quilt is finished at last.  I showed the top a couple of weeks ago.  A big stack of these blocks were donated to our quilt group, and I finished some of them into a child's quilt to donate.

In my head, I call this The Paw Patrol Quilt, because of this block in the upper left.  It was on top of the stack when I received them.  I chose 12 additional blocks from the pile, looking for other kid prints and bright colors, and made 7 more from my own scraps.

The block pattern is a Disappearing Nine Patch, using 3.5 in. unfinished squares instead of the more usual charm squares.  Because the pieces are turned after they are cut, it's a challenge to get any one way prints (like these dinos) all going the same way.  I had to figure it out and write down which way to turn the squares.  (I still messed it up a couple times lol.)  I do like this block, and may make it again sometime.

The blocks were a little wonky, so I had to trim them down to be the same size.  They would not have lined up properly if set side by side, so I added the narrow sashing. 

The backing is regular cotton, but was once made into a tablecloth at a girl scout camp.  A friend recently passed the tablecloths onto me to use as backing, and it has worked well.  They must not have used the tablecloths very much at all.  (I used another tablecloth on the back of the Jumping Jacks quilt I showed at the end of August.)

This is such a fun time of year for those of us who participate in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  It's time to start putting quilts together from the blocks we've made all year!  I am working on a couple, but I'm also still making blocks!

This week I made multicolor string blocks.  The colors are even brighter than this photo appears.

Pure chaos!  Wild and crazy.

Smaller pieces make up the Grocery Chain strips sewn on actual grocery receipts.

Still crazy!

These 3-D Flying Geese are a little calmer, thanks to the white background.

So now, am I done making RSC 2024 blocks?  Maybe!  How about you?

Last Sunday, Hubby and I went to the big quarterly flea market in Elkhorn.  It was perfect weather, just a lovely day.

Lots of beautiful quilts were displayed for sale.  Prices were reasonable for the most part.

None of them came home with me, although the rose quilt on the right was very tempting!  I'm no longer collecting quilts.  But I can still enjoy looking.

I found yet another cool block I might like to make!  I saw this in Serenity Quilt Shop in Kenosha Wisconsin recently.  They had kits made up for the blocks, too.  There were blocks with bright colors like this, and...

soft floral prints like this!  Hey, I have soft floral prints!  I keep telling myself I can't make EVERYTHING.  But I keep trying!

No photos of the grandsons this week, sorry.  They were sick two days, and not here very long after school otherwise.  Nothing serious, just the usual bugs kids get when school starts, and they're perfectly well now.  Next week they have a day off school, and we're going to make Halloween cookies and go to the apple orchard.

Thanks so much for reading!  Have a lovely week!

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy 

Black Cats, Multicolors, and Books

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

The black cats are here, in plenty of time for Halloween!

I made 20 black cat blocks as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  These little kitties told me they wanted their own quilt, so I said okay!  The border fabric came from a flea market, and I used up almost every last bit.

I convinced Snicklefritz, my very own black (and white) cat, to pose on the quilt for you.  

The back is a panel I bought at the quilt show rummage a couple of weeks ago.  

It's a cat print!  I had to add a couple of strips of stash fabric to make it wide enough.  I'll be donating the quilt to a good cause.

Do you have "too many" RSC projects?  I know I do!  I tend to get carried away, especially when I always choose such easy blocks.  Most of my quilts are made to donate to children, and I typically use bright colors and seldom include black, gray, beige, or brown. 

What about multicolor fabrics?

 Back when I first started with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, there was a month that called for Multicolor fabrics.  I hadn't yet started this obsession with novelty prints and didn't really have any multicolor scraps.  Boy, has that changed!

Since I have so many, I'm going to add them to my RSC projects through October.  Above are my Stretched Stars with multicolor centers.

Check out the Halloween print in the upper left!

Oh, dear, there's another headless dinosaur.  Ron and Ginny Weasley are looking on in horror.

The potato chip block got the multicolor treatment too.  Multicolor prints make some happy crazy chaos.   I apparently have cat prints everywhere, wonder why that is.

In other news, some new-to-me quilt books followed me home lately.  Do any of you remember Georgia Bonesteel?  She had a PBS show many years ago, and was famous for Lap Quilting, which at the time meant hand quilting using a hoop instead of a floor frame.  I eagerly watched the show and bought her books, but I had never seen this particular book before.  It's called Scrap Quilts from Georgia Bonesteel.  Good for inspiration, but the techniques are not what we are used to now. 

American Patchwork is a collection of true stories by quilters, and A Country's Call is a recent book (2019) of patterns for Civil War quilts by Mary Etherington and Connie Tesene of Country Threads fame.  They include short bios and pictures of real women from the Civil War.  

Lots of great reading ahead for the fall/winter months!

Speaking of fall, here's what I found at the Farmers Market this morning!  I could hardly believe we still could get local green beans at the end of September.  I'll freeze them and can the tomatoes later today, and just enjoy the broccoli and sweet peppers.

These Bartlett pears will be good eating, and they're a good size for the grandkids.  So funny that there's just one green one.

The grandkids and I are playing outside lately while the weather is nice.

Little Guy is even better at posing than Snicky!

Have a wonderful week!  I hope you have time for all the things you like to do.  Like quilting!

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with these Wonderful Bloggers:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Rainbow Strings, Black Blocks, and Breaking A Bad Habit

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's still summer here, over 80 degrees every day which is unusual for late September.  My only complaint is the lack of rain, but we may get some this weekend.

As long as the weather holds, I'll be taking pictures outside.  I'm calling this little quilt Rainbow Strings, and it's my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge finish for 2024's blocks.

The border is a dark print, in honor of September being dark month at the RSC.  Just kidding, I just liked it with the strings because of all the colors.  It looks like fireworks to me.  I bought this piece in an antique shop in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were there for the eclipse.

The backing is also rainbow--rainbow stripes!  I had to add a strip of solid fabric each at the top and bottom to make it long enough.

I tried to lay the quilt out to get a flat photo, but somebody thought it was play time.  Snicky!  What are you doing?

I distracted him with a toy and quickly snapped this photo.

The quilting is diagonal lines in serpentine stitch, 3 lines across each 6 in. square.

There will be more string quilts to come, as I made a LOT of string blocks this year.

Black Blocks

Black scraps are fun in these potato chip blocks!  This block has 2 penguin prints, 2 cat prints, buttons, jelly beans, stars, stripes, and a Harry Potter symbol.

Here are the rest of them!

Also, I made these black hexagon blocks for my 1800s reproduction quilt.  They look kind of dull just by themselves...

but much better when mixed with the other colors!  Someone once told me black prints are to a scrap quilt like salt is to food--they enhance the "flavor".  This is a bigger quilt, and a more long-term project.

Breaking Bad Habits (or Trying To)

This mess is evidence of one of my Bad Habits.   Most of these pieces are leftovers from backing.  For many years I have mostly used light fabrics for backing (can you tell?).  When I finished a quilt and trimmed off the extra backing,  I had the bad habit of  just stuffing the backing strips in a basket for "later".

Well, it's later.  I have more time now that my grandsons are in school all day, so my excuse for not dealing with this has evaporated.  Oh, dear.  This is a LOT.

Remember this old joke? How do you eat an elephant?  The punch line is One bite at a time.  I would prefer not to think about consuming endangered animals, but I get the idea.  We can do lots of hard things by breaking them down into manageable steps.  So I started.

Step one was sorting out the few colorful prints and trimming them up into useful pieces.  There weren't very many, so that didn't take long.  Next, I divided the light strips into piles by width--small, medium, and large.  For the next week, I would take a pile to the ironing board, iron at least 10 strips, and trim them to useful widths.  If they were too short, I cut them into squares and/or rectangles.  It felt great to finish a pile, and that helped me keep going.

This is what I ended up with.  The strips are 4.5 in., 3.5 in., 2.5 in, and 2 in. wide.  All this has been added to the Parts Department for future quilts.  And now when I finish a quilt, I'm cutting up the backing strips as soon as I trim the quilt!

Are you ready for this?  I took this photo outside my grocery store last week.  Fall is coming!

Have a wonderful week, fellow quilters!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Check out all the great quilt blogs at these links:

Finished or Not Finished Friday

So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge

Oh Scrap