Design Wall Monday - 5/1/17

Happy May Day!!
I missed the annual May Day Breakfast at the church 3 doors up from my house. We had a fire call at 11pm and a rescue call at 3am - both were false alarms so all with well except I slept in a bit and completely forgot the breakfast until I was leaving for work. The church has been doing a May Day breakfast for 124 years - are there any local churches that do a breakfast near where you live?

Sew...
Did you miss me last week? I was away at 2 conferences - one in Buffalo and one in Rochester. Of course working extra before and after to get the work done. Ah...the woes of a one woman office...

Luckily they were the type of conferences where I can sit and stitch while listening to the speakers - in fact, I listen better when my fingers were busy and that means I got a lot of hexie work accomplished. Woohoo!!

I started with getting three of these rosettes together. These chrysanthemums are the birthday shapes from our hexie club from 2015. I think I am now more than halfway done. They will be machine appliqued on to a background for a lap size quilt and I hope to get the background pieced soon now that I have found more shot cotton in the color I needed.

Then I moved to these Salt & Pepper blocks. All the blocks have black-on-white jewels around a white-on-black hexie surrounded by burnt orange diamonds. I had the centers done a while ago so I just needed to baste and stitch on the diamonds.

Next up were more twisted hexies. This will be a bed size quilt when it's done and it's one of my top 3 hexie UFOs to finish this year. I keep changing my mind which I want to focus on this year. These pieces had to all be basted and stitched together.

And finally, I finished stitching on the final hexie for my 3D project. Woohoo! The cardinal fabric on the right was the inspiration fabric and will be used as the backing.

Normally I take papers out as I stitch along, especially when I need to reuse papers instead of buying them. Apparently I didn't need to reuse the papers cuz here they all are. It won't take all that long, it's just something I need to add to the honey-do list.

And because you know I can't resist... I am pretty sure this is going to be my next doll quilt. I recently saw a gorgeous yellow and gray quilt and I think this design will work well with that color scheme. The central hexies will all be the same gray while the triangles will be various bright yellows. I purchased the gray and first yellow yesterday - now I just need to find a ton more yellows to add variety.

Hey - an actual wall for Design Wall Monday. LOL.
My fav brother installed the fan and dad make the rosette to
cover the hole left by the old off-center light

And lest you think I'm a one trick pony - I've finally got some color on my bedroom walls. I was hoping that one coat would do it but that's not the case. #2 will be going on later this week. I'm trying to rest my self-diagnosed golf elbow which is exacerbated by repetitive motions like painting and hexing...cuz y'all should know that the closest I get to golfing is the annual golf tournament for our fire department. No matter what, I read that not taking care of it right away can make it a chronic condition and I've already ignored it for several weeks...

Design Wall Monday - 4/25/16

2 pieced hexies and 2 chrysanthemum rosettes (hexie club birthday shape for 2015)
completed at my conferences last week. I've finished some other rosettes but they got
filed away before being photographed. Oopsie!

My work conference is held in Saratoga Springs every other year. On those years
I stop at a quilt store south of Syracuse on the way home. This year my goal was
blue/yellow/orange (across the top) for my pieced hexie project and hexie fabrics
along the bottom for my iSpy . This brings me up  to 96 different hexie fabrics!!
Thing is, I think I need 4 more to finish the design I am working on. Oh and the
green batik (top left) is sashing for the iSpy. Unless I change my mind, of course...

This weekend was a statewide volunteer fireman recruiting event.
The weather was gorgeous but the event wasn't very successful.
We did get 1 application which is better than none...

Yesterday was spent making the rest of the iSpy blocks and sewing them into twosies.
I'll have to finish pressing them tonight. Can we say boring??!!

Design Wall Monday - 4/11/16

Salt & Pepper blocks completed in MD

I'm baaaaaacccckkkkk!

Twisted hexie blocks and extra black centers completed in MD

Didja miss me?

"house" blocks completed in MD for hexie club birthday swap

As you may recall, I disappeared from the blog for a week of laziness after a long Easter weekend to visit my uncle in Baltimore and then for a 2nd week after being sick. I may have disappeared from the blog but I was still working on projects in the background.

pieced hexie blocks for Mickey Depre's 2016-17 sampler.
These were machine sewn before the trip. During the trip I trimmed seam allowances and basted them.

I suppose your first question is what happened to my March quilt lab clean up project. Since I was out of town, sick and I'm now getting ready to go out of town not just once but three times, it's been placed on hold or maybe delayed is a better word.

I've been trying to catch up on my i-spy blocks since vacation.
This pile of 30 blocks has the wonky black-on-black borders attached.
They were later trimmed down to 6.75" square - a boring job if ever there was one :(

 Let's just say that I'm still working on cleaning the lab but it's taking longer than expected since life has gotten in the way. I'm not surprised. Are you? I highly doubt that it will be finished in the next month or 2 due to a big project so lets just call it a longer term (summer?) project.

more twisted and pieced blocks completed at home

I expect there will be hexie finishes in the next month and there are also new projects so there will be plenty to entertain you in my ongoing hexie UFO saga....

All but 4 of the I-spy blocks are completed. I've got them layed out sorted by left
 /right angles and by which BOB fabric so I can keep it balanced.
I know - it's a little OCD.
I'll be at several quilt stores this weekend to look for more hexie fabrics and then
I'll start to sew them together. I have 90 hexie fabrics as of today!!!
Some are the same pattern but in different colors - there are prob 80 different patterns.

Back to the Design Wall...

I sell name badge holders at one of my conferences -- this is batch #1.
This is a new (requested!) pattern since the girls wanted zippered compartments.
I hope they like them...

We traveled to Baltimore, Maryland for a long Easter weekend and then stopped in Intercourse, PA on the way home. That meant that I had 10 hours travel time for stitching as well as tv time at my uncle's house. I was quite productive, if I say so myself. Of course, I still packed 3 times too much (this is what happens when the supplies take up so little space) but it was nice to switch projects now and then.

I've started to make some of the blue pieced hexies for Mickey's pieced sampler

Since returning home, I've finished some of the projects started on the road trip and worked on others as well. I have not one but 2 conferences this weekend so there will be plenty of stitching time - I just need to pack enough to keep my fingers busy which helps me concentrate in the classes better.

I finished the left card trick block and made a second.
I will make at least 2 more and then assess what to add for the proper doll quilt size.

I had originally intended to lay them out with the teal always in the upper left but I layed one of them
 down backwards and I'm kinda liking what will become a teal 'X' and a purple 'O''. 

Quilt lab cleanup post #1

Project background: I'm spending the month of March cleaning up my quilt lab and blogging about all my hexie UFOs along the way...

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I didn't see Janet's request to start with the curio cabinet until after I had already started on the cutting mat so I'll do the cabinet next.

I had chosen to start with the cutting mat because it's kind of grand central for my quilt lab - everything seems to start and stop here. And apparently a lot gets dumped here as well! I thought a nice/large/clean area would be very encouraging for the rest of the project.

This is what I started with. Not the worst I've ever had but not the best either considering I could only use about 11" x 20" on a 24" x 36" mat.

We have a monthly birthday swap in hexie club and Denise is our penpal member.
I finally sorted her envelope of birthday shapes into the storage bin with my prepared shapes.

This weekend I had been working on my hexie iSpy quilt by cutting more 5" squares
of hexie fabrics and black wedges. When I started cleaning I had 52 blocks made, 29 cut and 4 more to cut.

While cleaning, I cut the last 4 and put it all the parts back into it's bin.
 This will be a nice no-brainer project when I'll have an hour to sew.

Hmmm..left over fabric from Value Proposition...put this in the fabric-to-put-away- pile.

I'm working on a kind of new project and decided I would use my Fiskars cutter to cut our 1/2" hexies from all those annoying magazine inserts. I cut a page worth this morning while I was waiting for the car to warm and maybe melt some of the ice encrusting it. Not sure where to store this unless I just gitter done and put the hexies in with the project and put the Fiskars away.

The 3 shot cottons were on the cutting mat since I had cut the olive green a few weeks ago. The round tin usually contains the finished Chrysanthemums I spread out and the choco tin held the rest needing to be put together. These are the 2016 birthday swap shape and I'd like to get the background sewn together ASAP so I know how many more chrysanthemums to make but I might need to get more olive shot cotton first...

Hah! - found an empty plastic bin to store the fabric and to-be-completed chrysanthemums in.

These are from my POTC project. For a while I had some spare bits at my couch work station to use thread ends. Not sure why it was on the cutting table but I finished these up while watching TV and put them away in the POTC box.

This is new fabric for a hexie project that I haven't picked yet - I just couldn't pass on the pretty fabric.
I put it in the someday pile.

And this is what I ended with!! Woohoo!! I spent time doing tiny bits of work to finish parts of the projects so it prob took a bit longer than I had originally planned but it's nice to have those bits done.

The tin holds batik strips to trim into half hexies for my Twisted hexie project.

Lookie there - I trimmed them up this morning, set the tin aside to house another project and now
my cutting mat is 99% clean with just my rotary cutter at the ready and my hexie rock.

Yipp - that was 8 hexie UFOs/WIPs on just my cutting mat. This is gonna be a loooooooooong clean up...