FNSI Results - Start of Pythagoras' Lute

I'm a tad bit late showing the results of my FNSI, but I did get to sew that night.

I worked on my final project for Project quilting.  The theme was triangles.  Unfortunately I didn't get the project done on time - it still isn't done - there were a couple of reason why it didn't get finished.

First I had a hard time deciding on a pattern - this time I didn't have trouble with ideas, the trouble was that I had too many ideas and didn't know which one to pick. They were all wonderful in my mind. I finally decided to to start on a twisted triangle log cabin quilt. I even colored my layout and started picking out fabrics, but as I was laying the paper piecing patterns on the wall, I decided I wanted to make the quilt a lap sized quilt and I knew I couldn't complete that that in the amount of time I had left.

So I went to plan two, Pythagoras' Lute.  It has ten paper pieced wedges. I thought to myself, "Surely I can knock that out in two and half days, it's only 10 wedges." I reasoned that the piecing would take the longest, but once that was done I could do some simple quilting and still make the deadline for Project Quilting.

Well, when I got the pattern I found each wedge was made of 16 smaller pieces.  I small snag, but I still had hope. The first part was slow going. I was switching between the ten different fabrics for each tiny piece and cutting small pieces here and there from bigger chunks and trying to line up the pattern to make sure I was doing it right.  Then I realized I printed the pattern wrong (sizing issue) and had to scrap the whole first half of one wedge.  Then I started the same process again with right sized templates. I was beginning to think I had bitten off more than I could chew, but as the clock got closer to midnight I finally had an epiphany.

There are five color combinations, and each color combination is done twice, but the second one is done in reverse.  I realized I could take one color combo and complete all the pieces at once and then move on to the next color combo.  My piecing went much faster after that, but bedtime was looming and I had to get up at 6 am to get to my first day of BIO lab.

--This term is my last college term. I am taking Bio 101, the lab to go with it, and my last business class.  When these classes are over I will finally have my bachelors degree!--

I had planned to sew the rest of the Saturday after my bio lab and knock out the top, and quilt it up early Sunday morning, but my Bio Lab ended early.  You would think that would give me more time to quilt, but that wasn't the case.

My family had planned a trip to visit the in-laws that same weekend, but they had to leave by 1pm in time to get to a planned event. That meant I couldn't go because I wouldn't get home from my lab class till after 2pm or later.  But since my lab ended at 10:30 (that included my lab partner meeting afterward) instead of 12:30, I suddenly found myself free to go with the family.  I rushed home, packed up my stuff and headed out of town.

I didn't get home till midnight Sunday night, so needless to say I didn't get my last project done for project quilting, But that is ok.  We hadn't seen some of our relatives in almost a year and it was definitely worth it to see them.   I am still excited to finish Pythagoras' Lute, but it will have to turn into a UFO for the awhile.  There are other quilty items that are due first.  I don't think I will put this one in a bin though. The ones that go in bins seem to stay a UFO the longest.  I shall keep it on the desk in a corner to remind me to keep it on the current to do list.

=^..^=

Wild Thing on the Wall

This is what my design wall looks like this morning - rows of my Wild Thing quilt.

I got a few rows done this weekend.  I like to sew my rows in pairs, then pairs again. 

That way I don't have a huge part of the top hanging off the machine when I get to the last row.

I spent my other sewing time this weekend working on costumes for the Lake City Community Theater's production of The Sound of Music. I have to make the play clothes for all 7 Von Trapp kids.  I brought all the costumes to rehearsals last night for fittings.  I have a couple alterations to do and then I will get some good pictures to show.

I'm linking up with Patchwork Times for Design Wall Monday.

I am also listing this as my March Goal for A lovely Year of Finishes.

=^..^= 

UFO to a WIP

 I worked on my Wild Thing quilt two days in a row.
Does this mean this project has moved from a UFO (Un-finished Object) to a WIP (work in progress)?
Or is it is considered both? Either way I am moving right along with this project.

This was my progress from yesterday....

  

 and here are the blocks today.

I'm linking up today at Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday.
Click on over to see what everyone else is working on today.

=^..^=

Wake Up to Kona Blog Hop

Today is my day for the Wake up to Kona Blog Hop and I am excited to show you what I created!

I started with this Classic Color Palate roll up and a bunch of Kona White and a wee bit of Kona Pacific.
I was inspired by the "Jelly Roll Strip Starburst" pattern by Kimberly Einmo.

I sewed the strips into groups of two and cut them on the 45 degree angle to get the diamond shapes.

The jelly roll gave me enough for 10 color coded stars plus four scrappy stars, I only ended up using two scrappy stars for my first project.

This is one of the bigger quilts I have made.  It measures 76 x 96 inches.

It needs a little more quilting in the white sections and the border and then it will be finished.
I am thinking about entering it as my challenge quilt for my quilt guild's annual show.
The theme is "A little Color in My Life".  But to do that I want to put some really spiffy quilting in the white space and that will take me awhile to finish up.

I am loving these pretty points!

I have really impressed myself with this one.

A little patience and a hot iron really pays off.  :)

After I was done cutting my star blocks I had a lot of these scraps leftover.  I am not one to throw away fabric so I came up with an idea.  It meant getting out the stitch ripper and the rotary cutter again but it was worth it.  The idea was to make a bunch of small pinwheel blocks and turn it into a small child's quilt that had pinwheels with wide sashing.

These are some of the scraps trimmed, grouped, and ready to be turned in to 3.5 inch pinwheels.

But then my husband gave me a better idea.  He looked at my design wall while I was in the middle of sewing together the first quilt and he said, "I really like these fancy pinwheel blocks.  You don't see these everyday."  When I told him those weren't the blocks I was making he didn't seem as excited. I told him they only looked that way because I was sewing the other half of a star block.  He really liked the pinwheels, so I got to thinking... 

Why not use the two left over scrappy stars and turn them into the fancy pinwheels you don't see everyday.
To spice it up even more I added all the tiny 3.5 inch pinwheels in the border and some more Kona White and TADA!  

I call this one "Floating Pinwheels".  It is 50 x 50 inches

I think I like it better than the first quilt and already want to make another one using the same color combo as the pinwheels that were on the design wall.

And as if that wasn't enough, 

I still had some scraps leftover so I decided to make a pouch.

The gray I used is Kona Pewter.

~~~

These twenty 1.5 x 2.5 inch scraps, plus one jelly strip (a brown that didn't seem to fit anywhere), are all that is left from that jelly roll.  I could probably chuck these, but you never know, I could find just the right project for them.

Make sure you go visit the other hoppers today.

They have some great Kona projects to share with you as well.

I Piece 2-Mary

A Reformed Heath’n

From This To That

A Quilting Sheep

CeLynn’s Sunflower Patch

Robin’s Fabric Nest

Quilted Delights - (Me)
Sew Me Something Good



=^..^=

Celtic Solstice - Link Party #2

Here are my pieces for step 2 cut out and ready for sewing.  I spent most of the weekend attending Christmas parties and finishing up some holiday gift sewing - I'll post those photos after Christmas - so the sewing part of this step is still on the to "do list".  

Check out the progress from everyone else working on the mystery at the Monday link up.

=^..^=

Celtic Solstice - Link Party #1

I did pretty good tackling step one of the Celtic Solstice mystery quilt this weekend.

I sewed all my orange triangle squares together and 20 of my white ones.

And got half the blue on the remaining white triangles.

220 more seams to go and I'll be done with step 1.

Yep, I am doing the king size version!

To see how everyone else is doing check out the link party on Bonnie Hunter's blog.

=^..^=

Starting Celtic Solstice Mystery

Usually when Bonnie posts her mystery quilts I sit back and watch as each step is posted. Then when the big reveal is posted I wished I had played along.  So this year I am doing just that.  This will be the first of her mysteries where I follow the steps as they are posted.  This afternoon I took a break from my regularly scheduled quilting projects to cut out all the pieces for step one. I am going to tackle the king size version!

Now i'm off to the sewing machine....

=^..^= 

November FNSI

When I signed up for "Friday Night Sew In" I commented that I was going to sew the night away.
What I really did was "press" the night away.
Each stack below has 10 blades in it.  That makes a total of 400 blades that needed be be turned and pressed.

Who knew turning and pressing 400 wedges would take most of the night.
All these blades will end up making two quilts, one for me and one to give away.  

I did want to get some actual sewing done for FNSI so I stayed up long enough to sew one full Dresden plate together. It was nice to be working on this Christmas quilt and the one I posted yesterday.  I have spent most of my time quilting for others these past couple weeks so it was fun work on a little something of my own.  

Click here to see what every one else worked on last night for FNSI, (scroll down for the link ups).

=^..^=

Christmas Top Done

After fiddling with different layouts for my Half Square Triangle strips, I finally came up with this layout.

The top is made from nine big star blocks, but when they all got sewn together a whole new pattern emerged. Perhaps I can do some quilting to emphasis the stars.  

Tonight for Friday Night Sew In, I am going to tackle my Dresden blades.  I have quite a few left to press before I can even start sewing them all together.

=^..^=  

Cutting Up My Christmas Strips

 One of the items on my Q4 FAL list is to make a fourth Christmas quilt out of the 2 inch Christmas strips I cut at the beginning of the year.  I didn't remember how many I had cut out so when I counted 80 strips, I realized I could definitely make more than one quilt out of all these strips.

(The cut squares above the strips were used in my HST Christmas Quilt top.)

I started out sewing a red and green strip together to get 40 pairs.  I took 12 of those pairs, sewed a 3.5 inch white strip on top to make a tube, and cut them using the strip tube method.  So far I have laid them out in double hour glass blocks, but I may do a pinwheel instead, or even a mixture of both.

I took the remaining 28 pairs and put them together to get 14 strips of alternating red and green. 

 I decided these would make a great festive Dresden plate quilt.  Each strip gives me 20 wedges, which is how many wedges there are in one Dresden plate using the Easy Dresden Ruler by Darlene Zimmerman.   I plan on making these scrappy, and I want each Dresden to have one wedge from each strip strip, but that means I will need 20 different strip sets so I need to cut and sew 6 more alternating strips.  That will give me 20 Dresden plates.  That might be too many for a small quilt, so I'll break it up into two Dresden quilts.  That will give me three more Christmas quilt tops when I am finished, which is good, I have big plans for these beauties.  ;)

In the middle of my cutting, Jasper must have thought I needed a break.

He sat right on top of the strip I was cutting.

=^..^=

Getting Wicked

My project for the Wicked Blog hop is under way.  It is an original design and I am excited about it!

Can't wait to show it off on October 22! 

=^..^=

Time to Sew Rows - Orca Bay

I placed all the sections on the design board to make sure nothing of the same butted up next to each other.  It was fairly easy since there are so many different fabrics.
All I have left to do now is sew the rows together.


=^..^=

Adding the Red and Blue Strings

I am on the home stretch! My goal is to have the top finished by the next guild meeting, which is October 3.  I already had the blue string blocks finished and today I put them on the design board with the Ohio Star Blocks. This morning I finished up the last of the red string sections.  

Phew, these red triangles took the longest and there weren't even as many of these as there were Hour Glass Blocks.  I definitely know that chain piecing makes things go faster.  I wasn't able to do that with these string blocks though. I took my time finding strings that were just the right length - I hate to waste fabric, even string fabric.  Now that they are done, it will be a breeze to add the "wings" (which I have already started).  Once the wings are on all I have to do is piece the rows together.  I even have the borders ready to go.  I Can't wait to see it all together.  I am totally in love with this quilt!

=^..^=

Lots of Ohio Stars

These blocks would make a great quilt all by themselves, but they are going into something else.

I have been asked to be in charge of the Opportunity Quilt for my guild and I have decided to make an Orca Bay quilt.  It was Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt a couple years ago.  I didn't do the mystery at the time but every since I saw the finished quilt I have always wanted to make one. I figured this would be the perfect time to do it.

I used a lot of my own scraps and also asked the ladies of the guild to donate their red, blue, black, and neutral fabrics.  Then I went out and bought some fat quarters to fill in the rest of the scraps.   I wanted to have a lot of different fabrics in the quilt.  Each Ohio Star block has a different red fabric center.  That is 56 different red fabrics!  I love it!

I'll finish up the colored string blocks this week and then I will add them to the Ohio Star Blocks.  I am getting really excited about this project.  I may have to have my husband buy a bunch of tickets so I can increase the chances of it coming back to my house when it is finished.  ;)

=^..^=

End of Summer and some Economy Blocks

Summer doesn't officially end till September,
but for us School starts tomorrow, so it is the end of our summer vacation.

We spent our last week of summer at the beach.

We only had two good days of sun.
The rest of the week was rainy.
But that didn't stop us from going to the beach.
We went every day of the week.

Rain or shine.

We had a great send off to summer even with rain.

One of my favorite places to go is to Huntington Beach State Park and walk all the way to the jetties. It rained on us a little on our walk that day but after that the clouds decided to let us enjoy the beach without having to squint through the rain.  Even though it was cloudy it was still warm.  That is the good thing about summer rain.  You can play in it and not get cold.

Huntington Beach state park also has access to the marsh.  They have some nice boardwalks to walk on where you can check out the local wildlife.

You can't tell in this photo, but the sun actually came out for a good 30 minutes while we walked the boardwalk.

I think I dread summer ending as much as the kids.
I really enjoy having them at home.
I will be sad to send them off to school in the morning.
I may just cry.

I have plenty of things to keep me busy though.
The are house chores of course, but I also need to finish up my Christmas advent calendar that I started for the Ho Ho Ho blog hop.

This is what the finished quilt will look like.  Last week I had all but the border done.  Some people told me it looked good just the way it was but I really want to add the small border. I did the design and coloring in EQ7.  I got the program for my birthday in May, but it isn't as user friendly as other software so it took me a little while to get the hang of it. I still feel like I am trying to understand it and that is not like me, I usually pick up software pretty easily.   The company is nice though, I emailed them a question when I just couldn't find the answer anywhere, and they were friendly and polite and answered my question pretty quickly. 

  The outer border needs 52 three inch Economy blocks.  With blocks this small I prefer to paper piece.  It gives me nice sharp points every time.   I sewed two sample blocks to make sure I had the right size fabric triangles. Then I printed out 50 more papers and the rest of the fabric I need to finish the rest of the blocks, which I will chain piece. 

=^..^=

My day for the Ho Ho Ho Blog Hop

For the Ho Ho Ho blog hop I wanted to make a Christmas pinwheel quilt.

I made the one to the left, a much smaller version, years ago and gave it away.  Since then I have wanted one for myself.  This blog hop was the perfect motivation to get my sewing machine humming with plenty of time for me to finish this up before Christmas.

This is what a pile of pinwheels can look like.

 I can't wait to get it quilted and bound in time for Christmas.

Another project this hop inspired me to work on was my advent quilt.
I still want to add a 3 inch border before I call this one complete.

 I embroidered these numbers over 10 years ago.  Each year I planned on making some sort of advent calendar with them, but I always spent too much time sewing holiday gifts and never got around to sewing the numbers together.

  I would always tell myself I can do it in January when the festivities are over, but by the end of the Christmas season I was ready to move on to other projects.  So I am glad I decided to participate in this hop to get my personal Christmas sewing started early.  

The pockets are kinda of small, but I plan to put Christmas quotes, scriptures, or riddles inside.  Possibly mini scavenger hunt clues for the kids.  A clue a day, or a clue to where bigger sweets are stored. We can have a small adventure each day till Christmas.

This tiny candy cane was the only holiday decoration I could find in July.  It fits perfect.  ;)

Click the links below to see all the other bloggers who are posting today.

August 9

Moose Stash Quilting

Cathy’s Chatter

Darlington Delights

Life in the Scrapatch

Quilt n Queen

Forget-Me-Not Stitches

Quilted Delights  (ME)

AnnieOak Designs

Sew Peace to Peace

Wips & Tuts

Just Keep Swimming

Sew We Quilt

Happy Hopping