Saturday, March 21, 2020

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












Saturday, March 14, 2020

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