A Baby Quilt, String Blocks, and a Fruitathon

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Today's quilt is brought to you by the color purple.  It's actually a kit cut by the lovely ladies at my quilt guild from donated fabric.  I guess you could call it a charm square quilt, since all the squares are cut at 5 inches.  It will be donated to a child.
 

The focus fabric is this one with the children.  Aren't these kids cute?  It's an Easter print.  The kids are dressed up, and holding bunnies (real and chocolate), baskets of eggs, ducks, plates of cookies, etc.  There is even a kid in a duckie costume.

The raspberry pink binding fabric was originally intended as the border.  I added a light purple border with hearts and vines instead, and used the pink for the binding.

On the back is this cupcake fabric, plus a strip of the light purple hearts and vines print to make it wide enough.  I got the cupcake fabric at the museum sale (blogged about last week), and it's already come in handy.

Blue month at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge had me making string blocks this week.  I really LOVE making string blocks!  They go fast, look cute, and use up scraps that wouldn't work for anything else.

I still have this much left, so more string squares are in my future.  I'm piecing my blocks on cloth foundations and they finish at 6 in.x 6 in.

A good hot iron is essential when piecing any quilt blocks, but especially ones like strings that need to be pressed often.  I have had lots of trouble with irons in the past (can you relate?).  One brand new one didn't even last two weeks!  I bought this one at a big rummage sale about a month ago, just as a back up.  It's a Sunbeam Ironmaster, and it must be old since it was made in the U.S.  The volunteers at the sale had marked it with a Tested label, which meant it worked, so I took a chance and bought it for $1.  

I am THRILLED with it!  And I never say that about an iron.  It gets beautifully hot, doesn't shut off, and glides across the seams.  I hope it doesn't quit on me, but even if it does I've already got more than my money's worth out of it.

One more rainbow kitty block happened!  I just can't stop making them.
 

In other news, it's been a fruitful week.

On Tuesday, I went to the U-Pick farm and picked all these lovely strawberries.  We've had more rain than usual this year, which affected the crop some.  The berries were plentiful, but there were also lots of rotten ones.

A nice lady at the strawberry patch told me about a truck at the local Fleet Farm selling peaches from Georgia.  So of course I bought a box on the way home.  According to the instructions, the peaches should be laid out like this for a couple of days until they are soft.  It took up half the kitchen table, but we worked around them (all of us love fresh peaches).  By Friday they were lovely and ripe, and easy to peel.  

I have been canning for days.  I got three batches of jam from the strawberries, plus 3 pints of berries in the freezer, plenty to eat, and two batches of strawberry sherbet.  The peaches turned into 12 pints canned, 2 quarts in the freezer, plenty to eat, and enough to make a small batch of peach jam later today.

Now that the fruit-a-thon is almost over, I can get back to quilting! 

A couple of weeks ago, my hubby took a 20 mile hike sponsored by a local group.  It rained all day that Saturday and they hiked through mud, but he persevered.  When this guy sets a goal, he meets it!  This photo was taken by a professional photographer hired by the group.
 

Have a lovely week!  I hope you have time for all the things you love to do.

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