Safe at Home

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's finished!  Safe at Home is my name for my house quilt, one of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects for 2020.

Last week, it was a roadblock.  This week, it's done and the way ahead is clear.

The pattern I used is called Home Made, was designed by Monique Jacobs, and was published in American Patchwork and Quilting magazine, issue # 162.  I used the house pattern, but made more blocks and set them differently than the original.  

When I started making the blocks in January of 2020, I had no idea what the year would bring.  I was just having fun using scraps of vintage fabrics, feedsacks, and 1930s reproductions in the color of the month.  

In March, the illness and death of the pandemic hit New York hard, and it was suddenly terribly real to all of us all over the country.  Home was more important than ever, as millions of kids (including our grandchildren) started virtual school, and millions of adults either worked from home or were unemployed.  

This quilt will always represent 2020 to me: the worry and fear we all felt every time we sneezed or coughed, the hilarious zoom fails of virtual preschool, the mask making, the dreaded toilet paper shortage, and the uncertainty still hanging over everything.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I used a quilt-as-you-go method on this quilt.  (After all this time, I must admit I am REALLY tired of this backing fabric.)  I will be posting more on the way I do this in the near future.

 The border is a vintage 1930s-1940s print fabric, probably meant for dresses or blouses.  I only had just over a yard of it, so that determined how wide it would be.  I quilted simple diagonal lines in the border, and bound the quilt with a green solid, also vintage, from my basement "collection".

 My youngest grandson, whom I call Baby Buddy, was not really in a posing mood yesterday.  He's sort of ho-hum about the whole thing.

In other news, I got a few more half square triangles done for this year's RSC.  These are loose on my design wall, not yet sewn into groups of four, but this may end up being what I do with them.

And the blue ice cream cones!  I looked up some blue colored ice cream flavors on Wikipedia, and was surprised to find out about Blue Moon ice cream, invented in Milwaukee!  So I'm saying the cone on the bottom left is Blue Moon.  Above it is Blue Heaven, a blue colored Australian ice cream flavored with vanilla and raspberry (mine has little candies), next to a Blueberry ice cream with raspberry ripple and tiny sprinkles.  Lastly, we have a truly original imaginary flavor, blueberry with Victoria sponge cake, strawberries and cherries.  All this, and no calories.

Outside, the rhubarb is getting taller and looking very healthy.  Little Buddy hoped it might be ready to cut.  I made him some rhubarb cake from last year's canned rhubarb, so he's content to wait a little longer.

Leaves are appearing on the black raspberry canes, an encouraging sign.

Spring is progressing as it always does here, two steps forward and one step back.  There was frost on the grass this morning, but sunshine the rest of the day.

I'm wishing sunshine for you this week, and blue skies.

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

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