Quilting Spools

I've had my scrappy spool quilt basted and ready to be quilted for months now, and I decided to start tackling it over the weekend. Once I spread it out and took a good look at it, I realized that I wasn't happy with some of my color choices for the spool bases. I used a lot of black fabric leftover from a Jinny Beyer project, and I just didn't like how it looked with the blue pastel background and other colors. So, I decided to change them

This is rare for me. I don't like going back and re-doing things, and I usually just go with whatever I've got and convince myself I like it. But for some reason, this irritated me enough to actually fix it! There was no way in hell I was going to take apart the quilt, especially after it was already basted, so I decided to applique new pieces right over the offensive parts. This worked really well for about 90% of the blocks! If you look really closely, you can see some dark bits underneath some of the new bases, but true to form, I've convinced myself I'm ok with that.

I'm quilting this in a sort of double tear-drop pattern, which I've only done once before, so it's a little not so good. I keep forgetting I'm doing tear drops and morph them into spirals, so this is a mash-up of the two. I think it works just fine.

A Lofty Goal

My drawer of finished quilt tops has now morphed into THREE drawers somehow, and you know what that means. Time to start finishing some of these up!

I emptied out the three drawers and laid them all out on the guest room bed, just to take inventory of what I have. That was fun! Some of them I'd completely forgotten about because they were made years ago. It felt like finding hidden treasures.

I have a goal of completing one quilt a week between now and the end of the year. This is pretty lofty and ambitious, especially for someone who's not goal-motivated whatsoever. But I'm putting this out there and we'll see what happens.

Friday Finish: Flower Garden

I just got back from a lovely week in Maui with my mother. We went to visit my sister, who's lived there for three years now without a visit from me! I don't know what took me so long, because Hawaii is amazing and I want to go back soon.
 

I finished this quilt before I left, but wasn't able to get a picture due to the week of rain we had. I quilted it using my walking foot because I've been into that lately. I like free motion quilting, but there's something satisfying about just sewing straight lines, pedal to the metal. Walking foot quilting seems to work well for smaller quilts, since it's too difficult to maneuver anything too big through my machine - and with straight lines, you're just going back and forth and up and down your quilt, so there's LOTS of maneuvering.

I had this finished in about two hours, and it's about time too because the baby this is for was born back in June!

In Formation

With my Wild and Goosey blocks all assembled, the next step was to get them sewn together into a quilt top!

I opted to put a neutral strip in between each block, spaced out with cornerstones like I did in the centers. I'm slightly second-guessing this decision a bit, just because it makes for a really busy, maybe chaotic look. All the twinkling cornerstones, all the little geese, all the colors...it's a lot.

But, you know me - moving on! This is a pretty small quilt, so after sewing the blocks together I decided it needed some borders; both as way to enlarge the whole business, but also to maybe give the eye a place to rest. I think the finished product looks pretty good. I like what the borders add, and despite my misgivings all the little pieces are so vibrant and charming. Yep, I'm all good with this now.

Recipe Time: Kielbasa and Cabbage Skillet

https://www.budgetbytes.com/kielbasa-cabbage-skillet/

With cooler weather starting to set in here in MN, I finally feel like cooking again! I'm still getting my weekly CSA box, and this recipe was a perfect match for using up excess cabbage, onions, and potatoes.

This was easy, quick, and very yummy. I followed it almost to the letter, except for adding a few cubed potatoes to the onions and sauteeing things a little longer in order to allow them to cook all the way through.

The recipe author suggests adding cooked egg noodles for a variation. Since I already tossed potatoes in there, I opted to skip the noodles, but I think they'd be great!

Mini Dresden Borders

I finished up my little Tula Pink dresden plates and have sewn them all unto light seafoam green background blocks.

I'm making the borders out of paper-pieced strips of leftover solid scraps - half of them out of blues/greens, and the other half out of purples. I'm not entirely sold on this color scheme, but I'm mostly done with all the border blocks and I'm running out of scraps (yay!), so I'm going with it.

I've been doing lots of paper-piecing lately, between these borders and my little "Wild & Goosey" blocks, but I'm not sick of it yet. For this project I'm using the paper more as a guide to work with as I sew scraps together willy-nilly and it just helps with keeping everything neat and within the dimensions I want.

Nothing to do with Quilts

" Up until that time I had not seriously doubted the rightness and especially the truthfulness of Gilead’s theology. If I’d failed at perfection, I’d concluded that the fault was mine. But as I discovered what had been changed by Gilead, what had been added, and what had been omitted, I feared I might lose my faith.

If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying; that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I’d had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering."

 - The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Margaret effing Atwood is a genius. Her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is controversial, with lots of people saying it's not needed, not necessary. I'll just say, I really needed this.

That's all. Back to sewing now!

Geese Families

Sewing my little geese into blocks of four has been tons of fun. I decided to separate each unit with a small neutral strip and a little center block for an extra pop of color.

One bonus of paper piecing is that it's extremely accurate. You don't have to worry about having a perfect seam allowance (which I NEVER have) because you're simply sewing on lines and as long as you can do that, you're guaranteed perfection.

I notice this especially when sewing these little guys together - there's no fudging on making things fit, no tugging or gathering, or all the little tricks I usually have to employ to get everything to match up. Would it be like this all the time if I simply became more accurate in my everyday sewing? Who can say? It's never going to happen, so for now I'm just enjoying this temporarily during my paper piecing projects!