Monthly Archives: January 2025

Quilt Tops, Crochet, and Quilt Shops

Other than running, walking, some post-holidays cleaning, and trying very hard to not read too much about the horrors of #47, I have enjoyed a fair amount of time in my sewing room. Not sure if this is true of you, but my interest comes and goes. Sometimes I just don’t feel like it and then other times, it is the best place to be!

In an effort to finish up existing quilt tops, I got this one basted and started to quilt it with a super loose stipple. This quilt top was given to me by Erika whom I ‘met’ on Instagram. She had a number of tops and asked if I wanted to finish one for donation. She even included the backing. It is such a pretty quilt and I will share it once I finish the quilting and get the binding on. Erika is clearly an excellent quilter as this top laid perfectly flat when I basted it. Plus the back was so neatly trimmed and pressed. It is all in the details, right?

Here are a few more projects I finished up over the past week or so. As I mentioned in my last post, I am working diligently to use up my 5″ squares. To this end, I made two quilt tops for the Quilted Love organization in Texas. I used to follow them on Instagram and love the fact that they will take quilt tops and finish them up. Being able to mail just the top is not only easier, it is less expensive. So far, I have completed two top

This little kitty was a breeze to make. The border on the left side has a wave to it so I need to unpick some stitches and fix that. I debated trying to do something to the bottom row of charm squares to make it look like a paw was showing. If anyone has any ideas how to do this, I am happy to unpick a few seams. I just couldn’t see how to do it.

This simple quilt used a number of 5″ squares and feels like a fun I-Spy quilt. The child who received this might look for kitties, Winnie the Pooh, birds, cherries, ants, paw prints, a cow, a deer with ice skates, piggies and even a dragon.

Both quilts finish at (about) 39″ by 44″. The organization has instructions here for the sizes they will take for quilt tops. Quilted Love donates quilts, preemie/NICU blankets, and some larger lap quilts for adults. If you are looking for a place to share your talents, this is a great option.

I have been working on my crochet skills. I would say I am still a beginner, maybe just more than that? I enjoy this sort of methodical, meditative hand work in the evening. This little baby blanket was so nice to make. While far from perfect, I am still happy with it. I bought both yarns at a thrift shop. The blanket is very soft and just the right size for a new baby. It will be donated along with the quilt tops.

Moving on to quilt shops….. My friend Annette and I took a quick run over to Annie’s Quilt Shop in Shelton, WA. Annette has been there but it was a first for me. What a great shop. Annie stocks so much fabric with a large variety. Tons of Moda, lots of novelty fabric, batiks, good selection of solids and a reasonable selection of garment fabric (knits, rayons and pretty wovens with a linen-like feel). Most interesting about the shop is their policy to cut in full yard increments. They will not cut a stack of 1/2 yard cuts of fat quarters for the customer. Because of this policy, they reduced their price per yard substantially. Most of the fabrics (new lines) were about $9.00 per yard. Of course there are many quilters who do not want full yard cuts. To help with this, there is one rack of pre-cut 1/2 yard pieces and another rack of pre-cut fat quarters. Also, I noticed she carries a large number of prepared kits. All of these policies mean less labor for the shop and a very quick time for customers waiting at the cut counter. I was very impressed. Thinking back to my days of having a fabric shop, I remember the length of time spent cutting 1/2 yard pieces – it is laborious. People seem fine with Annie’s business model judging by the number of shoppers who were in the store. Smart quilters could easily split one yard cuts between themselves just to take advantage of the price. As for me, I bought a cute panel for a cloth toddler book (they had an enormous selection), two cuts I plan to use to make a dress for my grand daughter, and a piece of woven fabric – I wish I could remember what it was.

I used it to make cloth napkins because it felt so nice and I think it will be absorbent. (I have made napkins from regular quilt cottons and the weave isn’t great for this use – just my opinion though.) I just finished these up and am curious to see how they wash. There were about four other colors I really liked so I just may need to head back to Annie’s if these work out well.

The next quilt shop visit happened to be a ways north of my home. Gossypium had a reputation for carrying a great selection of fabric and I wanted to check them out. We did some house/pet sitting for my son while he and his family were on vacation. This was a great opportunity to go for a quick run over to the shop. Much to my surprise, there were huge going out of business signs all over the building. It is so sad to see another brick and mortar shop closing up. Talking to the woman who was working, she shared how sad she was as she had worked there for several years and really enjoyed it. There are no other quilt shops in the immediate area. Clearly the sale had been going on for some time. They had several shelves of Kaffe Fassett fabrics at 50% off. These prints were the large scale florals in the less popular colors, sort of the leftovers. There really were not many prints that interested me. However the solids were 25% off. My solids are a bit low and what I do have are more the darker colors now.

The piece in the middle is a pretty pastel green which was a trick to photograph. These will be good colors to have on the shelf.

Can’t wrap it up without a few cute pictures, right?

Is there anything sweeter than tiny toes?

My older grand daughters were on a trip to Hawaii (hence the house sitting gig) and their parents scheduled a photographer to do a set of family portraits on the beach. They had sweet matching dresses and, from what I hear, were well behaved for the session. Afterward the water called to them, the dresses got a little wet, than maybe a bit soaked and finally, here they are! This makes me think of how I parented when my children were little. I know I would not have let this happen. I would have interfered and stopped them. But look at them. I suspect is a memory they will treasure. Will they talk to each other and remember when they were all dressed up and ended playing together in the waves at sunset. The dresses will wash out and no harm was done. When I look back on myself as a mom, there are a few things I would change. Of course it is always easy to look back, right? To think of how one would do things differently.

I am linking up with a few of my favorites.

Wednesday Wait Loss

Finished or Not Friday

Oh Scrap!

Welcome to Another New Year!

The holidays have passed, my Christmas decorations are put away and we are almost two weeks into the new year. At this time of year I used to look at what I did in the past year and outline what I hoped to focus on during the new year. My thoughts on both are sort of rumbling around in my head but I am going to try to jot them down.

The biggest event in 2024 was the birth of my third grand daughter. Clearly she has decided to make her parents crazy from the get go. She arrived a full three weeks early. When my son told me she had been born early in the morning on an October day, I was so surprised. No one was expecting her so soon! On her second day in this world, the pediatrician noticed something awry with her heart. It turned out to be pulmonary stenosis. In brief, this condition is a defect in the pulmonary valve to the heart and it restricts the blood flow from the right ventricle to the lungs. It is a big deal and when a 6 pound newborn is sent by ambulance to Children’s Hospital. It is just terrifying. She was in the ICU for the better part of a week. Her parents were afraid as were we. But the pediatric cardiac surgeon did a very successful procedure to enlarge the ventricle and she is just fine. It is likely this procedure will have to be repeated when she is older. She will also have cardiac care forever, to monitor the valve. However they say she is healthy and it should not be a huge issue. Yikes, this little one threw all of us for a loop in those first days.

Of course I did make my grand daughter a little quilt. I had a fun time with it and finished in back in September. I gave it to her parents at a baby shower in late September. For the quilt, I chose a stack of nine fabrics (nine was an instrumental number as I will explain in a bit). Each block is a six inch square that is ’rounded’ to a snowball shape using stitch and flip corners. For the corners, while I didn’t sew them on improv style, they were very free-hand. Each circle is a bit different from the last and I squared them up to make the blocks the same size. However, the triangles between them are all slightly different.

The fun part was this. When I was making blocks, I began to dread the process of laying the pieces out and balancing which fabric was where, making sure no two same fabrics touched, etc. I was thinking about how to do this with some logic and less hassle and thought about Sudoko puzzles.

Because I settled on nine fabrics, I was able to assign a number to each fabric and then just place them as they were on the puzzle. This put one of each in each row and column. I didn’t think about it at all and sewed nine patch blocks to match the puzzle. It was so simple. Of course as I sewed the nine patches together, I flipped one the wrong way and the whole thing now had a kink in it but at that point, it didn’t really matter. For the most part the fabrics were laid out in a balanced fashion. There is a print with a bird on it and the birds are pointing all in one direction but in the photo below, the quilt is sideways. So the birds are lying down and resting. 😉

This Sudoku method was super helpful for me and I will totally use it again.

Below you can see the backing and binding. The ‘I Love You’ fabric is actually a crib sheet. Her bed has these sheets and I thought it would be fun to use one on the back of the quilt. I quilted it free motion with hearts and flowers on the snowballs and a curvy line in the first border.

When I looked at my projects for 2024, I found I had made seven quilts. This is the lowest number in years! The bug to sew and quilt was not nearly as strong as it was. I did make some garments which I shared in this post. I have a couple of quilts I haven’t yet shared and will write a post on them soon-ish.

The fact that I made just seven quilts, seemed to create less of a need to post on the blog. In 2024, I wrote only 17 posts! For someone who enjoys writing and talking about whatever to whomever, that isn’t a whole lot of blogging!

This leads one to wonder what the heck I did do all year. Thinking back, plus looking at my photos on my phone (the best way to look back in time) I see my time was spent with family, our grand daughters, running, working on my crochet skills, volunteering for Friends of the Library and reading.

I worked on improving my time for running 3 mile stretches (5 km races) and did shave off a considerable amount. Over the year I ran 224 miles. In the end of April I pulled a muscle in my calf and had to take the entire month of May off from running. But averaging the miles ran over 11 months means I ran about 20 miles each month. Over the year, if I didn’t run, I tried to make sure to walk. My total for walking was 268 miles.

My volunteer work at the library continues to evolve. It is such a great group of women and I very much enjoy working there. I have taken on a few projects and love being able to contribute my time as there is such a direct correlation to increasing the funds raised for the library.

For 2025 – Hmmm…. I don’t have a huge list of goals for sewing. I have been working on donation quilts using up the stacks of charm squares I have. One quilt top is nearly done and a second is laid out on the floor of the sewing room. Simple quilts that will use fabric from my shelves. I want to continue on with this. Also, I bought the DuoLingo app and have been practicing my Spanish. I have only a tiny bit of Spanish that remains in my brain since taking it in high school in the 1970’s. Time to stretch my brain cells and see what I can re-learn! Running to keep fit is still high on the list. Can I squeeze in more than 20 miles each month? I know there is time to do it, mostly I just have to put on my shoes and get out there!

There is always more to be said but for now, this is enough. Wishing you all the best in 2025 – good health, much joy and lots of time to be creative!