Tag Archives: sahrr2024

2024 Stay At Home Round Robin – Finish

It is a bit early but my SAHRR project is finished and I am excited to share it! This event began in mid-January. With suggestions each week from a group of bloggers, the participants made quilts that could not be more unique. We were to pick a center to start with and build from there. Some quilters kept their center at the middle and others chose to off-set it. I made a small quilt (17″ x 18″) and others made large lap size quilts. Overall, it was so much fun.

My main goal was to use a bag of fabric that remained from my Stepping Stones quilt, made back in 2016. While I wasn’t able to use all of the scraps, I did manage to stick to using bits from that bag for this mini quilt.

Choosing designs to quilt in the various sections was fun. Loops, cross hatch and triangles filled most of the sections. I did quite a bit of dense pebbling on the black strips which was silly because it is impossible to see. I felt like I was quilting in a very dark room and just hoping what I was doing was right. The black thread was nearly impossible to see on the black fabric. I wish I had used dark gray.

Here is a close shot of some of the quilting.

I have the quilt hanging above the guest bed (which is in a corner of the sewing room). It looks a little lonely having there but I am on the hunt for something to hang with it. For the meanwhile, it is hanging out all by itself. Doesn’t this picture make a person think I have an immaculate sewing room?? Let’s just say there is a reason the photo was taken from this angle. 🙂

Many, many thanks to Gail, Wendy, Kathleen, Anja, Emily, and Brenda for the fun weekly prompts. I am excited to see the other finishes that are linked up at Quilting Gail’s site on March 18th.

I hope you will participate in and enjoy the upcoming Villa Rosa Designs blog hop!! It is sure to be lots of fun – so many quilts and patterns to be shared and prizes to be won. See you back here for my post on Saturday, March 16th!

SAHRR – Final Round & a Little Extra Project

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I knew this event would go quickly! Here we are finishing up the sixth round for the Stay At Home Round Robin and then it is time to quilt it. Crazy fast. The final week was set up by Kathleen McMusing. For her prompt she asked we incorporate letters or numbers into the round. In her post, she provided so many fun ways a person might do this.

I really didn’t want to add more pieced blocks to this very busy little quilt. Instead, I took the fabric I had left from the five inch square you can see at the top, cut a narrow (1.5″) strip of it and stitched it to the side. To balance things out one last time, I added another strip of the blue along the bottom.

I am calling it done. When I look at this, I feel like it is complete. Hopefully I will baste it and begin quilting it this weekend. Everyone will be back on March 18th to share their finished quilts. I believe Gail (the originator and organizer of the event) said there were about 50 quilters participating. Creativity abounds in this group so I am excited to see the finishes!

While I am here, I want to share this quick little placemat I made this week. My grand daughters both have birthdays in March – Big sister will be 7 and Little sister will be 4. I thought it might be fun for them to have a birthday placemat they can share, each one using it on their birthday.

My sister, Cathy, has a shop on Etsy called 6 Monkeys & Co where she sells handmade childrens’ clothing. She thoughtfully saves many adorable scraps for me to quilt with. Making clothing means a large amount of extra fabric that isn’t useful to her but is very fun for me. Anyway, that this where the birthday fabric scraps came from. Just enough to piece together a placemat.

I glued strips or rick-rack trim around the edges before I put the binding on. I was concerned it might make the binding bulky but it wasn’t a problem at all. The backing fabric is a festive rainbow of polkadots. Hope the girls enjoy this during their birthday month. I won’t see them for a couple of weeks so I need to get this off in the mail to them.

Update to last week’s post – I attending the Project Linus meeting and it was quite fun. These women work hard! So many donations that needed to have labels attached. Also loads of donations of fabric which I spent several hours sorting and measuring. I plan to return to the next meeting. Yay!

Enjoy the weekend everyone! I will be working on the SAHRR quilting which I am looking forward to.

100 Year Old Ladies, SAHRR Round 4, Ruler Quilting, and Hand Quilting

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Lots to catch up on today! I think my priorities are correct in introducing my 100 year old grand daughter. Big sister is in first grade this year. She loves school so much. This week her class celebrated the 100th day of school for this year. The children came to school dressed up as though they were 100 years old. It was so much fun to see the joy on her face when the day finally rolled around.

She was so cute with her gray hair (wig) and cat eye glasses on a chain. H was watching the bus pull up with this huge grin on her face. These special days at school are so much fun for the kids.

Moving on to this year’s Stay At Home Round Robin…. It was Brenda’s week to choose what we were to incorporate into the round. She chose the square in a square block, also called an economy block. For some reason, I had the idea I needed to make a larger block and it was bothering me. I couldn’t come up with a way to use a bigger block. At first, I thought I would skip the whole round. But then I decided to try and make a tiny one. My first attempt was very wonky and I tossed it. Then I tried again and made two blocks I was happy with.

The blue piece set the size for the block. The blue square measured 1 1/2″. I cut large white squares for the surrounding triangles and chopped those in half. The finished square ended up being two inches. I made two of these. They are totally improv which means the center is not square. (I still need to trim the blue corners on the back side). I love them!

I also made this blue border by alternating the solid blue with two tiny black and white HST’s. As I mentioned before, all of these bits are leftover from a quilt I made a while back. As of yet, I have not attached the blue border or the tiny S-I-S blocks. I want to wait to see what comes up on Monday. But for now, I like the idea of this layout.

Since I keep referring to the quilt I first made with these pieces, I thought I would show the original quilt to you again. I made this quite a while ago as part of a quilt along with The Inquiring Quilter. Seems like seven plus years is long enough to hold on to the extra bits. Time to use them up!!

Hand quilting is a great way to keep my hands busy while watching television or listening to an audio book. This peek shows a snippet of a wall quilt I am working on. I stitched much of this while Ray watched the Super Bowl last weekend. By the end of that time, my fingers were sore. Even with a thimble, it is hard to push that needle back and forth for a long period of time.

In the sewing room, I have been working on a quilt for a blog hop in March. (I am way ahead of schedule on this)! The layout of this quilt allows for lots of FMQ practice. I have been quilting it with a straight ruler. After a number of squares like the one above, I think it is time to switch to a curved ruler. When I practice with the curved rulers, I have a lot more hiccups. There are so many pretty motifs to be stitched with rulers so I am motivated to keep practicing.

SAHRR – Round 1 and 2

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Last week turned out to be a busy one and while I did make the first blocks for the 2024 Stay At Home Round Robin, I never had a minute to write a post. So, let’s catch up!

For the first week, Wendy of PiecefulThoughts, chose signature blocks. I was pleased with the choice because they make a nice graphic border and are simple to make. So, thank you Wendy!

I made eight of the signature blocks without a real plan as to how I would use them. At that point, I set them aside to wait and see what Round 2 would bring.

Anja of AnjaQuilts is the host for week two. She surprised all of us with a very simple instruction. We are to do as we please but use only two colors. My vision came easily. I decided to use black and white, include the signature blocks and finish off the first border.

The signature blocks are arranged in a pattern reminiscent of the zig zag on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt. They follow around the corner of the block and each side finishes with either black or white. The two remaining sides are bordered in black. At this point the block measures 15 inches which is great. I hope to combine the next two weeks into one border as well because I keep this to about 20″ square. I plan to hang it on the wall in my sewing room. Within the next round or two, more of the royal blue will be included.

I will be linking to AnjaQuilts for this week’s link up. One thing I love about this SAHRR is the unique interpretations of the weekly prompt. Looking at all of the projects linked up, one really wouldn’t think they have much in common yet we are all following the same prompts each week. To see the variety of SAHRR projects, click here.

Stay At Home Round Robin

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Last year was the first time I participated in the annual SAHRR (Stay At Home Round Robin) hosted by Quilting Gail each year. Gail began this quilt along during Covid as a way to stay connected during quarantine. I jumped on board last year and it was a lot of fun. I like the challenge of a new block to use weekly in any way I want. There are quite a number of quilters involved now and seeing the interpretations of the new block was really inspirational.

Last year I made a baby or toddler size quilt using pieces I had cut for a different project which had since been abandoned. It was a great use of the fabric.

This year I had a few ideas of what I wanted to work with. My bin of orphan quilt blocks (the leftovers from projects, test blocks etc.) is stuffed! After pulling three different piles of fabric and unused blocks, I finally made a decision.

This block is made of bits left over from a quilt I made years ago as a gift for my niece and her new husband.

I have quite a variety of pieces leftover and will do my best to re-purpose them into this quilt. I can always add to this as needed but I hope to use most of this. Likely I will have to cut up or take apart some of the existing blocks. The challenge will be meeting my two goals; use up the leftovers and keep the quilt size as small as possible. Watching other quilters last year, I saw many who combined weekly assignments into one round. Six bloggers will each post one block but this doesn’t mean the quilt has to have six separate rounds.

If you want to see what some of the other quilters are planning as their starting point, I would pop over to Quilting Gail’s to take a look. We are linking up our starting blocks there. I can tell from the variety of chosen center blocks, each quilt will be unique. Now to wait until the 23rd when Wendy of Pieceful Thoughts announces what we are to use for the first round!