T-shirt Quilt and the Scholarly Stitchers

This is a near closing event for a journey into my quilting with the Scholarly Quilters Group.  We have had such a great time over the years, but with retirement in December, it will shortly end for me.  We have at least one more project.  I will post some of our successes and accomplishments here between current projects I am working on alone.

This was a t-shirt quilt The Scholarly Stitchers from the libraries made for Weigel Library.  Weigel Library is a branch library for the architecture school at Kansas State University.  You probably cannot see that the sashings are architectural etchings.  The architecture t-shirts were saved by a retired Weigel librarian and our group designed and constructed the quilt around the t-shirts.  The quilting was done by a professional longarmer.  In the group from left to right--Alice, Regina, Connie, Gay, Barbara, Mary.  Cindy is the only one missing this year.  Our group started in 2001 with some of the same faces throughout the many years.  We have gotten smaller but much more talented, I think.

Block 1 Deck-Ade-Halls

It has been such a nice cool end of July--almost too good to be true for this time of the year; however, it was wonderful piecing weather.  The first block of the Deck-Ade-Halls went together fairly easily.  I did make one mistake and put the white in the button part of the stomach and had to take that out after I had that sewn onto the head and arms.  That was not fun but not too difficult to fix.  The most time consuming part of the whole thing was cutting out all the pieces and putting labels on everything.  It would have been almost impossible to keep all the pieces straight without clear labels.  Anyway, my gingerbread men turned out darn cute.  I really wanted to start on the next block of stars, but I had to stop.  We had picked up a few more 1/2 price Roma tomatoes and some bell peppers, and they needed to be planted before it started raining again.

Grunge Plans

Grunge fabrics are some of my favorite fabrics, and I would love to have every single color.  My soon-to-do project plans are to work on a pattern by BasicGrey called Happy Churn Dash Quilt and use my bundled fabric which includes the Grunge fabrics Romance Red and Duchess Pink.  They are way powerful and again so out of my usual quiet, sedate colors of light tans, burgundies, and greens.  But, hey, this grunge combination makes me smile and feel joyful.  However, even though I am anxious to start on this project, I need to start the BOM Deck-Ade-Halls by Fat Quarters Shop this weekend.  We will see, as there are tentative plans to look at cars the weekend, and the garden is calling in case anyone is listening.

Good weekend for piecing

I got almost 8 hours of piecing time this weekend which is highly unusual but so very nice.  As usual I stayed true to my personality and flitted from one thing to another by working on 3 different projects.  My plan was to work on the free Christmas quilt by Fat Quarters Shop.  I have all the Alpine Frost fabric ready to start cutting, but no I don't even open the bin.  So what did I get done?  I got 2 more Bonnie Hunter crumb blocks, a sample of Missouri Star Quilt Company and my first try out of a hexie by Mickey Dupre -- oh, and also a few more Bonnie Hunter Spoolin blocks.  I took pictures, but the hexie has one turned the wrong way.  It isn't sewn together yet, and I might change the arrangement.  All this special time is due in large part to a very sweet husband who takes care of some the house duties like cooking and laundry that I don't get done.

This is the 1st Jellycake quilt I made for my sister, Lynn.  I called this one Breeze.

Tropical Sunshine Quilt.  I used the tutorial by Missouri Star Quilt Company for Jelly Cakes which is one of the fastest and most fun quilts I have made.  This is the second quilt I have made from this pattern and probably not the last one.

Crumb blocks.  I watched a Bonnie Hunter cam and thought these were just the thing for  my small pieces that were almost unusable scraps except for crumb blocks.  Cut junk 4 paper sheets 2 1/2 inches x 8 1/2 inches--start in the middle and use your scraps.  Remove the paper and you have an 8 1/2 inch block.  Be creative.

This was a good day for accomplishments.  I got bindings sewn on for the Bohemian quit and the Tropical Sunshine quilt.

More birthday cards for department co-workers

I finished the last 3 birthday cards for CDA department (serials, ILL, collections) co-workers.  I wanted to use calligraphy on them, but did not want to take the time; therefore I used stamps.

Leader & Ender Challenge for 2013/2014

I have been a Bonnie Hunter fan for several years and have a couple of mysteries "in the works".  It is nice to have a free scrappy concept when piecing quilts--very freeing.  The biggest problem is just getting everything organized between the lights and medium/darks and in the right strip sizes.  The newest Leader & Ender challenge was announced on Quiltville's Quips & Snips yesterday.  It will be the Split 9 Patch.  I started last years Spoolin', but this will be way faster and doable.  Especially since I have an Accuquilt Go to make the 6 2 1/2 inch squares.  I will probably use her recommendation for the Easy Angle ruler for the half square triangles.  That way I can just cut 2 1/2 inch strips.  Here is the sample from Bonnie's website.  As you can see one half is mostly medium and the other half is light.

Recent Projects

I have been busy piecing and have really accomplished quite a few projects which I will document here.
Recently, in the last two weeks actually, visited our son in Seattle.  Usually I get to as many quilt stores as I can manage, but this time I only visited two.  Martingale publishing company headquarters is usually a stop as well, but I now have a library of quilt books and was afraid I would be too tempted to add to the shocking amount I already own.  Now I try to limit my quilt book purchases to new techniques or just gotta make projects.  In fact I added two new ones by Emilie Richards, as I am joining Starwood's Quilter's Book Club. The Wedding Ring is the July selection and there is a companion quilt book which I just had to have.


Here are some of my projects