Treadlestitches: A Finish, A Fix, and Fall

Saturday, October 3, 2026

A Finish, A Fix, and Fall

Welcome to Treadlestitches! Thanks for stopping by!

Here it is, my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge finish for this year, made of 42 crumb blocks. In my head I've been calling it From the Cutting Room Floor.

I'm excited to have this finished because I have a deadline at the end of the month. I'm donating this one to the GSAFE online auction. GSAFE is an organization that supports LGBTQ kids in schools.

If you've made crumb blocks, you probably know how much fun it is to fit all these little pieces together. Lots of my scraps are novelty prints, so there are little pictures all through it of things like rockets and lions and dinosaurs and Piglet and Patrick Star from Spongebob.

Sometimes thing can look sort of strange, like the back end of a cat or a headless Pooh Bear. (Sorry, Pooh!)

For the border, I chose a border print designed by the late Laurel Burch called "Jungle Songs". The designs were printed in strips across the fabric. I bought it second hand and didn't have a very large piece of it, not enough to have all four borders the same. So there are two different borders, one for the top and bottom and one for the sides.

The top and bottom borders have all these amazing animals. I especially love the leopard.

The side borders are a colorful African mask print. I've had this piece of fabric in my stash for a long time. I'm really glad to find a good place for it.

It's not a big quilt, just 42 in. x 48 in. It could be a child's cuddle quilt, or hung on a wall for a splash of color.

Here's the back, a neutral for one of October's RSC colors. And a purple binding for last month!

And now for a correction. Do you remember this quilt top? I was making it from a kit cut by the amazing Nancy, Queen of Scraps from my quilt group.

Above is the adorable frog fabric it's made from. I thought I had finished it and posted it on Sept. 11. But when I went to clean up I found the directions stating it was supposed to have 9 rows, and I only had 8. I then found extra pieces, but I was one short of the large squares. I looked all over, and didn't find it. Nancy didn't have any more of the fabric. The organization we are making this for asked for quilts to be 60 in. x 80 in., which it wouldn't be without the last row. What to do?

In my collection of novelty prints, I only had one small piece of colorful frog fabric. I made a 9 patch block with the orange print and pieced the new row.

Then I ripped and resewed to get the new square in the center. Now it's a "design element", right? Anyway, the top is the size we needed. I'm not sure what happened to the missing square, but I have my suspicions. Our young cat Lizzy has been carrying around the occasional sock or glove lately. I may very well eventually find that square tucked in a corner or under something.

Probably after our volunteers have quilted this top though.

One of our long-time quilt guild members passed away recently. This week volunteers from our group sorted through her fabric etc. that her husband had bagged up for us. Knowing I make lots of quilts for children, they set aside these fabrics for me. Here they are, all washed and dried and ready to go. I'll be thinking of Cheryl as I work with her stash. RIP Cheryl. Hope you're quilting in heaven.

We're having a lovely fall in Wisconsin this year. I went to the orchard yesterday and bought a half bushel of Cortland apples, one of my favorites for crisps and pies. I'm going to get started on canning them today. I also bought some Honey Crisp apples, my husband's favorite, just for eating.