Tag Archives: Dresdens

February Scrappy Projects

I started the month off by working on two scrappy projects. Kind of nice to play a bit and use up a few pieces from my scrap bins. Besides what else was I to do while the Super Bowl was on??

The first block I made is for the 2020 Monthly Color Challenge. The color is blue and the block was a quick make. Coincidentally, I used polka dots again this month (I used them last month too, but in yellow).

These look so happy and it is making me wonder if I should try to go for a polka dotted theme with this quilt. I need to check the bins and see if I have enough dots though. I am NOT going to buy dotted fabric to make this happen. Sort of defeats the purpose of scrappy quilting, doesn’t it?? Jen does have the colors she will be focusing on listed on her blog. I will take a look and see how many dotted fabrics I have to decide if this might work.

After this block, I decided to pull my orange bin as that is the color for February over at Angela’s RSC2020 challenge. I had absolutely no idea what I was wanting to do with them but thought I should make something just to use some of the scraps up. Plus, I was in the mood to play around.

Somehow it popped into my head to make a Dresden block. I have seen lots of minis or wall quilts with a series of Dresdens of various sizes and colors, made to look like flowers. I think I will do something like this. I like the Dresden’s with the curved tips and might alter a few to look like that as well. It will be a fun thing to work on here and there.

This week was our monthly guild meeting. My friend Sophia encouraged the guild members to make tree blocks for Australia’s fire victims. The result was fantastic. There was a sew day with one local church group of quilters and quite a large stack of blocks was created.

The variety of blocks showed a great deal of creativity. It was fun to look through them since I didn’t attend the sew day. I did make two blocks though and you can see those here if you like.

There were lots of appliqué, many strip pieced trees and an assortment of traditional tree blocks.

This tree was drawn on the fabric which I thought was quite clever. If our little guild came through with all of these, I cannot imagine how many the Wollongong MQG is going to receive. Wow!

Now that my scrappy projects are wrapped up for the moment, I am finishing up the assembly of my Mosaic Quilt top. The main portion of the top is put together. I keep looking at it to see if some portion is flipped the wrong way before I put on the borders. It is much harder to take apart once the borders are on. It looks good to me but I am going to stare at it a bit more before I take that last step!

Linking to Oh Scrap! and Jen’s 2020 Monthly Color Challenge link (which I totally forgot to do with my yellow blocks!) Enjoy the week everyone!

Thrifting Fabric

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About a week ago, our local guild sent out an email to members stating a seamstress in town was retiring and having a sale. She wanted to clear out her fabric and supplies as she planned to downsize to a smaller home. I am sure you knew I would be sure to go check it out. The woman was both a garment maker as well as a quilter. Her shop was large and there was tons and tons of fabric.

By the time I got there much of the quilt fabric had been sold. But I was not really interested in quilt fabric considering the shop I have downstairs! My interest was actually in garment fabric. I found a few gems. Instead of setting a price on each piece of fabric (which would have taken days and days) the woman had a stack of plastic laundry baskets. The deal was $10 for whatever fit in the basket. Oh my. Let me show you what I picked up.

This is two yards (58″ wide) of a stunning border print. It is a cotton/rayon blend and has the nicest feel to it. I washed it and had no issues. I think Julia has claimed this piece for a pair of wide legged pants. That border will be so nice at the bottom of each leg. Sort of a boho look.

I picked up six yards of this fabric. Not a seersucker but it feels like one? I am not sure what it is but it washed well. Julia and I both want pants out of it and I am sure there will be leftover fabric.

Four yards of this gray and white chambray. It is really pretty and a great quality fabric. I am not sure what I will make with it. It is heavy enough to back a quilt but I think I want to make some sort of wearable with it. Hmmm…. decisions, decisions.

As I brought these up in the basket, along with a few oddball pieces, Carol (the seamstress) smiled and remarked my basket wasn’t yet full. I looked around and saw an antique unfinished Dresden quilt top stuffed into a corner. All hand stitched to a very thin muslin (as was often the case with this sort of quilt).

The blocks are huge at 18″ across. The fabrics look like the 1940’s – 1950’s. I picked it up and she said to add it to the basket. My plan is to pick the blocks apart – there are twelve blocks in good enough condition to use. Then I will fuse a very thin stabilizer to them since that muslin is so thin. Add some sashing from my vintage fabric collection and it will be a quilt top again. I am really looking forward to finishing this one and it shouldn’t be a huge project.

As I was waiting to pay, I saw this little quilt folded up on the counter. Apparently Carol had picked up the center patchwork piece and added borders to it. The little squares are 1 1/2″ and all hand stitched. It had been tied intermittently. I believe it looks like the remaining 1/2 of a quilt – if you look at the pattern, I think it continued into full square with that navy blue having been at the center. I am not terribly fond of the borders that were added. They are filled with puffy batting, probably a polyester. But it was calling to me. I could leave it as is and just give it a wash or I can consider taking those borders off and reworking it. Looking at the fabrics, the patchwork portion was also made in the 1940’s or so.

Julia will be busy this week with the county fair. Hard to believe her time with Leo has come to a close. Why is it that time goes by faster and faster?? Since we share a car, I will likely be home quite a bit which means lots of time to sew. I started a purse for myself a couple of days ago and want to finish that up. The quilting on my friend’s memory quilt is very close to being finished. Those two projects will be the focus for this week. How about you?

From one project to the next

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Lots of progress has been made on a few projects this week. I had some minor dental surgery done so I have been home taking it easy for most of the week. Much of my time has been spent trying to figure out how many ways I can prepare a diet of oatmeal, smoothies, yogurt and scrambled eggs. The ideas are running low though and it is lucky that I am able to chew things with a bit more substance today!

I posted last week about the Dresden plate table runner. I got the quilting done on that and am so happy with it. I kept it simple and it works beautifully with the Dresdens.

The back looks so pretty.

In addition, I started (another) Block of the Month project. Recently, I came across Mari’s blog, Academic Quilter . As I was reading through some of her posts at Academic Quilter I saw that she is working on two rainbow block of the month quilts. She has some gorgeous blocks pictured and I was intrigued. As often happens, one thing led to another and there I was looking at (another) blog, So Scrappy. (I swear I just get sucked in and lose all track of time when I start reading these quilty blogs.) Angela, the writer at So Scrappy is hosting the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for 2014. I decided to join in and start creating some rainbow blocks for myself. Again, a little late to the party so I need to work to catch up. My family was off and about on Saturday so I used the day to sew. I got the January (blue) and February (pink) blocks done. I have the scraps collected and prepped for March which is teal blue. Because I am getting going on this a bit late, I decided to do simple patchwork blocks using 2 1/2″ squares, ending up with 10 1/2″ blocks. I will sash them with white and put corner blocks in. Making two of each color will provide 24 blocks, enough for a quilt at the end of the year. It has been fun using up all of the strips that I have been so faithfully sorting and saving. Also interesting to see what colors I have an abundance of and which I have very little (the dark blue for example…. not too much of that available).

The other block of the month that I am working on is sponsored by Aurifil. I posted about this earlier this summer. I am just about caught up on this one. Two more blocks done! The bear claw took some time…. When I finished it, the block was only about 10 inches square. I stared at it for what seemed like forever, wondering why it was so tiny. I left out the interior border strips. So I had to spend a little time with my seam ripper and fix that up.

Here are the six blocks:

That is my quilting week in review! Summer is already more than half way through for us. My daughter returns to school on August 14th!! It’s going by way too fast. Hope you are all enjoying your summer!

Linking up with all of these lovely blogs:

FreeMotionbytheRiver, FabricTuesday, ShowandTellTuesday, and BlossomHeartQuilts. Also with NeedleandThreadThursday hosted by the lovely Kelly @ My Quilt Infatuation.