Color Block Stars and Stack It Up

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  Thanks for stopping by!

Good morning and happy Saturday!  The Color Block Star top is done and hanging on the clothesline.  I added the border on Wednesday and the weather cooperated for a sunny photo yesterday.

It was really too big for the clothesline at 54 in. x 68 in.  Twelve inch blocks really add up!

 In addition to two of each of the "regular" colors I made two black blocks and two multicolor ones.  I forgot how many fun prints I had in black and multicolor.

I bought this colorful alphabet on the border at the museum sale.  I guess blue is my favorite border color.  I use other colors but I always go back to blue.  Do you have a favorite border color?

Every block has 15 print squares plus one white one.  That makes 300 squares, right?  So why do I still have a full box of 3.5 in. squares?  (Magic?)

The top will be donated to the Children's Advocacy Center in Milwaukee.

The Color Block Stars pattern is available for free HERE.  It was part of a block drive last year for Many Hands Many Hearts on the Oh Scrap blog.  (Thanks, Cynthia!)

  

Working on the top reminded me to get started on some blocks for the current MHMH block drive.  We're making these easy "potato chip-ish" blocks in complimentary colors.  I'm a little short on red and green prints (except for novelties of course!) but I had some orange/blue and yellow/purple to get started on.

Now for some pastels!  Well, mostly.  This time they're green, and they'll be part of the pastel baby quilt I hope to finish before the end of the month.

In Progress

As you can see, I'm treadling again!  My treadle is now in the dining room right under the window.  It's a good place to sew, especially when I'm waiting on supper to cook.  The jungle outside the window is a tangle of black raspberry vines, now with baby green raspberries ripening in the sun.

Once I finished the Color Block Stars top I went digging in the kits, block sets, etc. for the next project.  I chose a partial kit I cut a few weeks ago to make Stack It Up, a Lori Holt pattern.  

Last winter I really got into watching Lori Holt's videos on YouTube.  She has so many fun ideas for scrappy quilts.  Click HERE for the video for her 4 in. finished Stack It Up.  I wanted slightly bigger blocks, so I scaled mine up to 6 in. finished by cutting all the pieces from 2 in. strips.

So that's all the sewing news from our house.   But there is something even better than happened.

Our eldest daughter finished her Master's degree!  That's quite an accomplishment while working full time as a first grade teacher and looking after her husband and two teenagers.  We're very proud of her!

Have a good week, everyone, and thanks for reading this!

Cheers,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

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

 

Frogs, Cats, Chips, and Swatches

Welcome to Treadlestitches! 

It's been harder to adjust to being in a different time zone for vacation than I expected.  We came home a week ago yesterday, and my sleep cycle is still not completely back to normal.  I'm hoping to get straightened out this weekend.

Meanwhile, I had this little quilt more than halfway done before we left, so it wasn't too much work to get it finished.

Can you see the frogs?  This was a big print I bought at a rummage sale, and I didn't want to cut it up too small.  The poison dart frogs are very realistic, and I'm sure some kid will enjoy them.

I've used this pattern several times when I had a large print that I couldn't figure out what to do with.  It's a free pattern from Quilts for Kids (Click HERE for the pattern page.  When you click on the pattern title a PDF will download). It's just a 4 patch with alternate blocks so not difficult at all. 

 Did you catch the orange accents?  I added them just because I liked orange with the dark blue, but I'll claim credit for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color for August.

The back is this grasshopper print.  I got it at the same rummage sale.  There's even some orange in it.

 Speaking of orange, orange cats!  I could almost makes these blocks in my sleep, now that I've made so many. It's so much fun choosing fabrics for these silly kitties.

My favorite fabrics to use are cat prints, like the one above.  It even has a tuxedo cat like my big buddy Snicklefritz!

I'm only making 4 potato chip blocks every month, so it wasn't too tough to sew them up.  Most of the rectangles were already cut.  I do admit to doing some un-sewing when I put the light ones in the center by mistake.

Do you know that saying, "Wherever you go, there you are"?  Wherever I go, I'm still a quilter, and still seeing things from that perspective.

For example, this:

Lovely squares in bright colors are on this enclosure in the Vienna airport.  I wanted to know what was inside.  It's a place for smokers to get a few last puffs before a flight. The idea is that the cigarette smoke is contained there and goes out through ceiling vents.  However, the door is constantly opening and closing as people enter and exit, letting the smoke out into the rest of the airport, so I think they need to rework the idea.  Still pretty though.

On one of our last days in Vienna, we went to the Museum of Applied Arts, abbreviated MAK.  There were some amazing exhibits of all sorts, from "architecture" at protest movements like Occupy Wall Street to Art Deco furniture and glassware.  (Click HERE for their web site.)

Fabric design is definitely an applied art!

How's this for orange?  This is a fabric design created on paper in 1927.  I don't know if it was ever made onto cloth, but I would be happy to buy a yard or two!

This one by the same artist was even better!  Sort of pre-Kaffe Fassett.

I was so happy to see these guys when I got home!  They're posing in a cardboard jeep at Vacation Bible School.  We've been having fun enjoying the end of the summer.

I hope you're having fun whatever you are doing this week.  Happy Quilting!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap