Sew Sunshine

I recently stopped in at the Quilts for Kids sew group to drop off some quilts I had ready to donate. On the table was a stack of reproduction 30's style fabrics. If you follow me you know that is not really my style but I knew that stack had been in the to do pile there for a while. I decided why not. I had two color groups and decided whatever I did I was going to use up every scrap in the quilts themselves.  My mom had given me long ago the Nancy Zieman plastic template for various sizes of tumbler. I remembered you cut a strip of the fabric then turn template to cut the angles. Perfect if you want to use up every inch!! For the pastels I picked the yellow and for the darker colors the blue green. I think they turned out pretty good.  I used whatever cuts I had left over to make the back wide enough. They each finished 45" x 54" so hope they can go to an older toddler maybe.  This is the first sewing and completing I have done in a long time. Still nursing back problem...

Have you heard of the children's book "The little ghost who was a quilt"?  HERE  One of the quilt guild members read it for fun to us at last quilt meeting. Who knew there would then be a #quiltyghost spring up on Instagram. This last weekend another quilt guild I am in held a retreat. Unfortunately I did not attend but my friend Jen from  Jennifer under the Juniper tree  blog and fellow quilt guild member, crashed the retreat for a few minutes. After we took our quilts and frolicked through the camp grounds taking a few snaps.  My favorite one was trying to sew a colorful patch but it looked like I was sewing myself...ha We laughed so hard and got a little sweaty not to mention dried leaves in a few unexpected places but all in all fun shenanigans.  Go check out Instagram #quiltyghost 

It has been ages since I have posted here. I had great intentions of course but just never seemed to get to the sewing machine much and so I felt I had nothing to post. On clearing off my phone photos I found I DID have some things of a creative nature going on. So first up is a newly made berm. We had a huge pile of dirt left over from replacing our front stoop and so we dumped here in the back yard and  tried my hand at a bit of landscaping.  My husband made a small bubbler out of a huge rock from the farm and I planted.  We loved all the bees and bugs and butterflies this summer. The birdhouse was also added and I can not tell you how much time we spent watching a family of wrens being created! Some of the amazing summer color.  Then right before the county fair and an outdoor quilt show I was going to participate in I fell at an outdoor guild swap sale. I don't even know how I did it but these knee bruises are post fall by 3 weeks. I still have bruising and scar ...

Here is my 2nd annual finish for Hands 2 Help hosted this year by Mari @  The Academic Quilter This is the Scrappy 4 squares quilt I came up with. It is one of 2 quilts I am sending to my choice of charity For more info on joining in or just to see how this works you can check out the link above to The Academic Quilter.  More about my process on making the scrappy 4 squares below.  Here is the block I played with: I showed some playing around with it in a previous post. I started with a color block in the center. In this case mine were 6". I then sewed random strips of fabric together. I tried to make sure they were wide enough to cut approximately 2 -2.5" strips out of each slab of fabric strips.  I used EQ to play a layout.  In real life this was pretty scrappy overload. I think it would have been fine but I wanted it to be a tiny bit bigger. So that is why I added the color strips in the center. I think it is okay and it made the finished quilt 42" x 42"...