Itty Bitty Cake Stand Update

Remember these?  They were pushed aside back in April due to my squirrelly nature.  In my defense, super scrappy quilts require a lot of fabric digging and cutting.  The quilt will finish about 90 x 90. The blocks are made from 1.75" squares.  Over the last few weeks, I worked on UFO's and new quick mini projects.  They were fun and just what I needed for a little quilty quick fix but now it's time to get back to the itty-bitty blocks.

Normally I take pretty good notes on my progress when making a quilt.  For some reason I neglected jotting down a few important details before setting this one aside.  My lack of memory and lack of note taking meant everything needed to be recounted. UGG!  One good way to look at it is, counting is better than cutting!  It's pretty obvious just by looking at the larger HST's that there isn't enough.  The quilt needs (169) 3" HST's.  I need to make (87) more.   I'm using nine colors in the quilt...pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, and brown.  Each color will need 18 or 19  HST's.

Time to dig through the fabric scraps.  I'm using the two at a time HST method.  That makes pulling fabric easier.  (9) orange, brown, gray and purple.  And then just enough to fill in the other colors.

The low volume white fabric scrap bin is getting low, so I decided to try something new to me.  Adding cream and ivory to the mix.  My cream scraps are lacking as well but I manage to get what was needed for the HST's from both scrap bins.

Within no time I was ready to put the pedal to the metal!

 TADA!  Isn't it pretty?

After stitching up the HST's it was time to cut more low volume scrappy 1.75" squares.  LOTS of them...1004 to be exact.  It was also time to cheat.  I've dug through the scrap bins all I'm going to dig.  And I've cut all the tiny little pieces I'm going to cut.  It's time to dig through the fat quarter stash.

Oh yes, I cheated and I'm glad I did.  It was so much quicker and easier. And it will still give me the scrappy look I'm after.  Plus, there's a few scraps leftover to add to my scrap bin that is getting low on scraps.  It's a WIN WIN or justification for laziness...HAHA!

All the parts of the quilt are cut and ready to assemble.  Since I'm squirrelly I thought it best to store them in containers just in case I change my mind on whether or not to start assembling them.  The container for the 1.75" squares is overflowing and needed rubber bands to keep it closed.  Just how many squares is in it?  3614.  

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Organizing Quilt Top Storage

While trying to find space for my most recent quilt top finish I found a couple of UFO's hiding in the quilt top storage.  For the life of me I don't know why I would do such a thing.  My sewing space is fairly organized, or so I thought.  The four bright dresden blocks were gifted to me years ago from Beverly of Blossom and Bev, aka 44th Street Fabric blog.  She no longer blogs but can be found on Instagram.  I love these blocks and need to find a plan for using them.  The other UFO is one of my test quilts from my pattern writing days.  

Both will be added to the proper UFO storage space. 

 I find it helpful to keep the UFO's in clear boxes, out in the open, so they can be seen and not forgotten.

Now that those have been dealt with it's time to organize the quilt top storage system.  I forgot to take a before picture, this is after they were all put into clear plastic bags.  Before they were in trash bags, grocery bags and batting bags.  I know a few of you are cringing...PLASTIC BAGS!  I've heard the scary tales of plastic putting off a gas that will ruin quilts.  I'm not scared and will take my chances.  This makes it much easier store them and quickly grab.  It also keeps them safe from the old dresser where they are stored.

Inside each of the 19 bags is a note to let me know what is needed to finish the quilt.  

As I sorted through the stash of quilts to be finished, I pulled out the ones I thought could be finished quickly. 

The quilt tops were placed back in the dresser/ironing station.  The quick quilts on top.  A couple of years ago this dresser was full of quilts to be quilted.  Today the bottom draw is storage for oddball things that needed a home. Hopefully someday the top two drawers will be empty.  Empty space in a sewing room...HAHA!  Silly girl!

 

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Starbound Quilt Top

 I started making this quilt from a picture I saved on Pinterest.  The picture had no information. Finding quilt pattern names is almost impossible these days due to algorithms that are supposed to make things easier.  I think it has made things worse.  I'm pretty sure he who pays the most gets pushed to the top of the search. Using all the key words I could think of I searched Google, DuckDuckGo, Pinterest, Bing, Instagram, and Facebook. I even did a reverse image search.  Thankfully my aging brain can still work things out with a little time.  I knew I had seen this quilt before, but where?  Since it is a simple quilt, it was easy to recreate without a pattern while my brain worked in the background to find the quilt pattern in its corrupted files.

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Using quilt logic, and assuming it was either a charm pack or layer cake pattern I started pulling fabrics from the scrap bins. When it came time to make the stars, I was running low on larger scraps, so I had to make the stars with no inner points.

Because I like BIG quilts, I added two more borders.  The red was cut from yardage, and the final star border was cut from leftover wide backing fabric.

Choosing the backing fabric was time consuming. I wanted a low volume print or more than one low volume, but this was the best my stash had to offer.   The large floral is Pioneer Woman fabric from Walmart and the navy-blue dot is an older Riley Blake print.

For the binding I chose a navy-blue gingham only because it was my first plan for the outer border.  After fussy cutting it and laying it on the floor with the quilt top, I didn't like how it looked.  So, it was fussy cut(again) into narrow strips. The gingham was carefully matched. When sewn together it looks like one continuous piece of fabric. Can you see the seam?

 

For now, this quilt will be put into the "needs to be quilted" drawer because I have a quilt on the frame waiting to be finished.  Who knows when this will be quilted because squirrelly is my quilty life.  So, when the time comes to put her on the frame I'll make the quilt label. 

About four days into working on this quilt I found the pattern!  My old brain thought it looked like a Primrose Cottage design.   Their designs are typically beginner friendly small square quilts.  The search was simple, start with page one of the quilt patterns and keep going until I found it or came to the end of the patterns.  It was at the bottom of page one!   Click image to go to the pattern.  Of course, I went back to Pinterest and added the name of the pattern in the comments of the pinned picture.

STARBOUND

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Patriotic Quilt Challenges

This quick and easy scrappy patriotic quilt is coming along nicely even though I've had a couple of challenges. 

The first challenge was finding enough scraps in the scrap bins to make (4) identical red star blocks and (5) identical blue star blocks.  Below shows what a normal variable star block looks like.  Sharp outer and inner points.

After cutting the large center square I knew I would be short enough of this fabric to make the star points.  I had a decision to make. 

1. Pull a new fabric from the larger fabric stash.  

2. Use a different fabric for all of the star points. 

3. Cut individual triangles for the points instead of doing flippy corners.  

4. Reduce the size of the star points for the flippy corner method and cut off the sharp inner point.

As you can see, I chose option four.

I took the chance, and I lost.  I needed two more squares and all I had was these small pieces.

 

Where there's a will, there's a way.  Quilting is all about patchwork.  So, I sewed the scraps together and cut them into squares.  It worked out perfectly.  Even I have a hard time finding the star points with the seams.  Winner!

Now to dig through the yardage stash for quilt borders, binding and backing.  I'm pretty sure the backing is going to be two or three different fabrics.  Well unless I find a good sale on 108 wide backing fabric.

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Quilt Therapy

Why did I need quilt therapy on the 4th of July?  Long story short...my neighbor asked me to feed her dogs while she was out of town this weekend.  While playing outside with them in the afternoon one of them took off on an adventure.  Two hours later and a lot of driving I found the dog.  I managed to keep my wits about me while looking for him, but horrible things ran through my head.  Upon returning home I broke down and let the bottled-up emotions out in tears.  After calming down I knew I needed some sewing therapy. Quilting on the frame won't cut it today.  I need to cut some fabric!   Something quick and easy to get a shot of dopamine (feel-good stuff) to my brain.  Since it's the 4th of July, might as well play with the red, white and blue scraps.

Rummaging through the scrap bins took the edge off of my stressed brain but the real hit of feel-good hormone didn't kick in until cutting the fabric.  Sigh...it was just what I needed.  I love red, white and blue.

I was as good as new by the time the fabrics were sorted into stacks for the blocks.  This was a good stopping point for the day.  Time to recharge my batteries with a good night's sleep. 

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Middle Of The Night Sewing

 Last night was the second night in a row a very little sleep.  About 4 hours of here and there sleeping each night.  Nothing on the internet or TV worth watching so I had to find something to do that wouldn't wake up Mr. Podunk.  As you know I've been quilting up old UFO quilt tops.  The Strawberry Shortcake quilt is still on the frame, but my quilter is kind of loud, and Mr. Podunk is a light sleeper, so I opted to sew at the sewing machine. 

The lights came on in the sewing room at 1:32 a.m.  As I stood in the middle of the room considering my options I spied the two tin boxes above my pressing table.

One of them holds my pin stash.  The other is full of pink and green squares of fabric.

These were cut about a few years ago when I took a notion to cut all my scraps into usable sizes.  After a couple of days of cutting I realized it was a bad idea.  Most of the fabric cut was added back to the scrap bins.  I'm not sure why I put these in this tin.  Anyway, the 1.5" squares were just what I needed.  My first thought was to sew them together as is but y'all know how I like white background fabric. So, the plan changed.

Under my quilter is my white scrap box.

The white scrap box is overflowing so this is the perfect time to use up some of the overflow.  

In the mess under the quilter, I found a fairly good size piece of backing scrap.  Using the larger piece of scrap makes cutting the background fabric quicker.

Within no time I had my assembly line set up and it was pedal to the metal time.

By 2:34 a.m. I had used up all of the background fabric, and I was starting to feel a little tired but not tired enough to go to bed.  So decided to edit these pictures and write the blog post.  While writing the post for today I started thinking about what to do with what I had sewn.  Writing the blog post came to a screeching halt and put off until this morning because I needed to use EQ8 to draw up a plan.

At 3:17 a.m. I started playing in EQ with ideas.  The plan is to keep it simple and big.  You know I like big quilts, at least 90 x 90.  So why not just make a four-patch quilt?  This will require a lot more four patches.  

I'm not sure how many two patches I made last night but I can tell you for this layout I'll need 1,089 four patches.  Whoa! That's a lot and I love the plan!  Here's a close up that looks a little better.

Then I started playing the what if game.  That's pretty much how I roll all the time when designing quilts.  The new plan is... Instead of using only green fabrics I could go super scrappy and use all the colors and low volume fabrics for the alternating block.  I love it!  By this time, I'm sleepy.  At 3:38 it was finally time to go to bed.

It didn't last long....awake at 5:58 a.m.  Fed the dog, made decaf coffee, read e-mails, watched some news, surfed the internet, and decided decaf isn't going to be enough for today.  It's errand day and sunny outside. 

 8:30 a.m. I'm drinking full octane coffee, writing this post I'm praying for a better night sleep tonight. If not, I may start cutting for the quilt above.

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