Improv Blocks and Given Away

After I finished the Jamaica quilts and the baby quilt for the church giveaway closet I thought I would get right to my own quilting.  Other things kept coming up to keep me away from my sewing machine.  I finally got some time to make some yellow scrap blocks.

I worked only on the yellow pile of scraps and I am happy that I didn't dump out all the other colors; just the  yellow made a big enough mess. The 3 blocks in the top row on the left are from my previous improv sewing day and the other six are from yesterday and the day before. That is not a lot to show for the time spent. I am not liking these blocks so much either, so..... I am rethinking what to do with all the scraps that I sorted a month or so ago.  For one thing I think I would be happier with them if I made them an inch or two smaller.  I am also thinking of cutting 4 1/2 inch squares from anything large enough. Maybe I just need to put it all away for awhile and work on something more intentional.

I have started divesting myself of the quilts living in closets and chests that never see the light of day. I change out some of my quilts with the seasons but there are some that only come out to be shown to someone or to be refolded.

My grandson and his wife took 2 quilts on Wednesday.
This is from the Quilters Playtime series when the The Basement group was working through Diane Hires book.

 This is Musical Chairs.






























This is "Reticent Stars" another from the Basement challenge to use something we bought but never used. I had a 60 degree triangle ruler and Sarah Nephews book "Quilts from a Different Angle. I am not sure anymore if  "black and white and another color" was one of the challenge rules for this challenge or if it was from a different challenge and I combined the two in order to kill 2 birds with one stone.




They plan to hang it over their bed where they have a  black and with and red Disappearing 9 Patch that I made for John some years ago.

My other Grand daughter in law took 2 quilts last Sunday and my daughter took a stack for her self and her children. I have to find the photos for those quilts and will show them another time. I told her to take photos of the quilts with the people who take them.

And that is another thing I have to do. I have to get all of the quilt  photos together in one place. I have them all over the place on CD's and USB disks. When I started looking for photos I realized how many I have forgotten.

Two Less Quilts

We had a very nice and very busy weekend. Yesterday we got together again with the out of town visitors and my grandsons fiance and her mother were subjected to a showing of most of the quilts living in my cedar chest, closet and storage cabinet. I'm pretty sure they didn't have an idea of how much time this was going to take. Last summer Jenna said she asked my grandson what she had to do to get one of my quilts and he said she would have to marry him; I told her that was right. So........ yesterday I got them all out and told her almost all of them were up for adoption.

She chose two.
She asked to borrow this one, to use on a table at their wedding. I told her she could keep it instead.

It was a Block of the Month quilt from a local fabric shop and the only time I ever made a quilt from fabric kits that were chosen by someone else. I chose the border fabric and designed the layout in EQ. The sashing and cornerstones were left over fabrics from the kits and they form a secondary pattern of stars. It has been one of my favorite quilts and I am happy that it will no longer be residing in the cedar chest.

This is the second quilt she chose after wavering back and forth between this and one or two others. She made this choice because she wanted something different in character from the other quilt. These Anvil blocks were made by the Friendship group when it was my month to request. I requested the centers to be made of  "made fabric" and the backgrounds be yellow or soft orange. I set them block to block. You can read more about it here.

Last evening I refolded all of the quilts that go in the cedar chest and put them away. I put the wall hangings and table toppers back on hangers and refolded the quilts that go back in the cabinet in the sewing room; then I ran out of steam.

Here is the table with those quilts still waiting to be put away. It is good to have a little more space in which to put them.

The pile on the left are the ones on hangers and they will be squeezed into this closet. The seasonal wall hangings and table toppers reside here and take up almost half of the closet. Some of these will soon be finding new homes.