Some Improv, some foundation piecing, and some mindless sewing.

To start with the improv piece I'm making following the first score in Sherri Lynn Wood's "The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters". Although I've been working on this for what seems like ages I haven't posted a photo since July; other projects got in the way, the fabric in a particular colour ran out, or my inspiration dried up! This week I added the section on the right, most of the part with navy in it and I'll be going further when I've finished this post.

Improv lap quilt following score 1 from The Improv Quilters' Handbook

Improv should be spontaneous; it should grow as you work and just develop within the limitations the quilter has set. I don't think months of deliberation are part of the picture.

Foundation piecing, on the other hand is strictly organised. To start with there's a pattern so designed to ensure perfect points - forget that in my case. At least with this pattern from Make Modern magazine  I didn't make my usual errors of cutting the fabric back to front. That's something I always do at least once, which would be fine if I wanted to use the back of the fabric!

4" Rainbow pincushion top: pattern by Angie Wilson for Make Modern issue 18

There are some missed points, all in the final joining stage; the sections themselves are fine. Does anyone have any tips for keeping the presser foot on track when sewing through so many layers of fabric and paper?! It was like a doing a skid course! In spite of the points I'm satisfied with the result, and it was a good learning experience.

After all that concentration I was ready for some mindless catch-up sewing in aqua which was February's colour for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Each month from January to November Angela gives a colour to work with. This month's colour is brown/black, so I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on my projects.
 

I still have to do green, yellow and orange. If I don't manage to sew them this year there's always next year!

I am linking up later today to 

Click on the button to view other catch-up and finishing projects.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Modern Pink

Each month Angela at Soscrappy gives a colour and a lot of quilters focus on using their scraps in that colour: the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. October's colour is pink.
I've made two pink blocks this week for the "make a block a week challenge" for the Dutch Modern Quilt Guild.

The block patterns have all been submitted by guild members. Some are traditional but most, I believe, have been specially designed.

These are both foundation paper pieced, and far from using up scraps, generated them! I'm useless when it comes to foundation piecing! Enter Mr Murphy and his famous law: it can go wrong, and it does!! So for all the fabric you see in the photos there's an equal amount reclining in my lovely new pink basket!

I made some progress on my improv floating squares quilt this week too, until I ran out of navy solid. Not only did I run out, but the LQS had also run out! That's life! Fortunately they agreed to give me a call when it comes in, so I'll be spared another trip for nothing. No recent photo yet of the floating squares quilt which is approaching lap size.

I'm interested to see which colour is coming up for November. I've got way behind with my sewing this year, and I really need to catch up with the missed colours, so maybe I'll be concentrating on them.

I'm linking up to the RSC link-up where there are already a lot of pink beauties to admire.

 

Click on the button to join the party.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Starry pink

October's colour in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is pink.

Cutting 2" squares to make this generated some more scraps for making the basket. As I still need to make a blue version of this block I also cut blue squares and started joining them in pairs as leaders and enders while I was assembling this one. I'm learning!

This week I also decided to cut a 2" strip and a 2.5" strip from every FQ I buy, as these are the strip sizes I use most. I'm not sure that this is a wise step; I don't want to find myself running out of fabric partway through a project! Only time will tell!

And here, finished this afternoon, is my pink basket:

I love seeing all the baskets lined up, and they are SO useful! How did I ever manage without a scrap saving system?! Finally I think I'm getting organised!

I'm linking to

 

Click on the button to see more pink delights. 

Happy sewing

Marly.

September was the orange month ...

... in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I have just caught up with two of the rainbow projects I started in January.

I showed the orange basket last week:

and this week I finished an orange 7x7 patch with wonky star.

I made a few at the beginning of the year but work got very busy in the spring leaving me very little time for sewing. I shall be picking up the projects in 2018 and hope to have more success.

I also made an orange wonky star for the Dutch Modern Quilt Guild block-a-week project. (I'm way behind with that too!)

In the meantime pink (October's colour) has now taken over my sewing room. I'm heading off there to start sewing my pairs of 2" pink squares together for the next 7x7 patch.

I'm linking up to 

Click on the button to visit Angela where everyone else is in the pink!

Happy sewing

Marly.

September is orange ...

in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and see here, what a lot of orange I've used!

EPP hexagons with 1" sides

When Angela announced the colour for September I was on holiday, and although I had fabric with me for making hexagon flowers, I didn't have enough orange for even one flower! Now I'm back home I went through some sorted orange scraps in a small zip-lock bag and found these:

orange scraps, mostly the ends of 2" strips

They are not enough to make one of these:

unlined scrap basket - pattern from Fiona at BubzRugz

There are probably more lurking in project boxes, so I'll get searching over the weekend.

This is all I have to show for September on the sewing front. Let's hope October proves to be more productive, especially as in addition to orange I still have to make an aqua and a blue basket.

I'm linking up to

so head over there to see more (much more) orange delights.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Neutral storage

The colour for August in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is Neutral. My scrappy project thie year is to use my scraps to make scrappy storage baskets and at the beginning of this week I was able to add another basket to the row.

All are in use, but have themselves depleted the scrap supply - what I wanted, of course - and are squishy and falling about. Maybe placing the quilting lines even closer together would have given more stability; maybe another type of wadding would have worked better. I have used what I had and the result tends to fall over somewhat when empty. Tough!

This basket has less "made fabric" than the others and more ends of strips and and long pieces from trimming backing. What all the baskets have in common though is that all are unlined. That's what drew me first to this pattern from Fiona at BubzRugz; it is quilt-as-you-go and then the sections are joined in the usual way for a bag with a flat base, with the backing serving as the lining. It's not as neat as it could be, but I'm not selling or even giving these away, they are solely for my own use and I'm not bothered about a lining; in fact I'd rather do without the hassle of turning the whole lot through a small hole in the lining.

I'm linking to

 

Click on the above button to pop over there and see more projects with scrappy neutrals.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Catching up with green and yellow

For the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC) Angela at Soscrappy sets a different colour every month and for several years I've tried to make something in each month's colour. May's colour was green and June's was yellow. Here are my green and yellow scraps. Very late!

scrap baskets: pattern by Fiona at BubzRugz

When my laptop packed up in April this year salvaging what I could from it took a lot of time; time that otherwise would have been spent sewing. Instead of interesting sewing I was moving files to an extension drive or to the recycle bin. How boring! One thing that initially couldn't be salvaged was my camera software; officially it has to be reinstalled from the CD. An impossible task if your laptop doesn't have a CD drive! Fortunately my husband found a way of extracting the software from the old computer, but that was the last he did before wiping the laptop clean towards the end of July. So now I'm able to post my rainbow progress, such as it is.

Now I am no longer struggling with software and data I have time for sewing again and am now only two months behind with the RSC colours! I have no more Jacob's Ladder blocks to show, and no more wonky stars; to be honest I've been using scraps faster than generating them. I think those will have to wait until I've made more projects, but first I have more quilting to do

On Saturday I'm linking up to

and on Sunday to

Click on the buttons to visit there and see lots more beautiful scrappiness.

Happy sewing

Marly.

From 9-patches to Wonky Stars

Each month Angela at soscrappy gives a colour for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and this month's colour could be the rainbow itself. It's multi-coloured scraps of fabric in this month's challenge. I've passed on this one, as I have very few multi-coloured fabrics, and they don't qualify as scraps.

Instead I've been trying to catch up on the previous months with purple:

and red:

wonky star blocks.

These started with the nine patches I made in February and March, to which I added more coloured squares and the white wonky stars. My plan is to continue using the colour of the month to make eight more 14" blocks this year. I hope to keep repetition of fabrics within the block to a minimum, but supplies are limited - 48 different fabrics in one colour is asking a lot!

Right after my last post I finished the red scrap basket, which now contains my red scraps.

Pattern from Fiona at Bubz Rugz.
Measurements:
height:  7.75"
base:     7"x 8"

Talking of scraps, which we do every Saturday in the RSC link-up, on 8 April I attended a lecture and a workshop by Jen Kingwell. Yes really, the Australian diva of scraps visited my home town in the little old Netherlands to intoduce a group of some 20 interested ladies from all over The Netherlands to her way of working, and especially to her pattern "Utah".

Most of Jen's quilts are sewn entirely by hand, and the Utah units are no exception: within the units all seams are curves which I've decided are easier done by hand, but I shall be joining the resulting 4" squares by machine!

Jen Kingwell pointing out the details of her quilt "Halo"

The lecture included a guided tour round her quilts which were on display in the exhibition area. Hearing first-hand what the inspiration was and how they all came together was truly inspiring. I am writing a post on the exhibition and my progress with the "Utah" blocks (of which this is an extract) and will publish it in a few days.

I'm linking to

   and  

so pop in there to see more delightful scraps.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Marching through red

March's colour in the RSC was red, and I've been "seeing red" all month without getting angry!

These red nine-patches are from 2" strips, mostly left from Bonnie Hunter's 2015 mystery Aliatare augmented with a few more recent acquisitions. 

Next up are leader and ender hour-glass blocks, also made using 2" strips and cut with the companion angle triangle.

A couple of weeks ago I described the fun I was having making slab blocks using really tiny pieces. Well, here they are again with some larger pieces, layered and quilted ready to be trimmed and then transformed into a scrap basket. 

Not entirely red, but a quilted basket needs contrast, doesn't it? 

I followed a tutorial form Fiona at Bubz Rugz, but while she only took an hour to make hers, I've taken the best part of two weeks and I still haven't finished! Partly because while she appears to have used squares and rectangles, I started with odd shapes. In addition I don't think I've spent more than ten minutes each day at my sewing machine in the last three weeks.

Lastly the Jacob's Ladder blocks have not incresed in the last two weeks; they are as they were in my last post. Thanks to Chantal I now have the correct name though: Hovering Hawk. 

Hovering Hawk

Thank you Chantal! Thank you too to everyone who made a suggestion about the name; you were all pretty close, usually with just a slight difference in the orientation of the small triangles.

Saturday I'll be linking up to

 Click on the button to see more red fun.

Happy sewing

Marly.

RSC 17 Looking for red

Angela at Soscrappy has given red as the colour for this month's scraps. Time to look out red scraps.

I have a bucket under my cutting table for the bits I don't want on the table. This bucket

was full, that is piled up and overflowing, of pieces of assorted colours and sizes. I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening separating

strings

from crumbs

from larger pieces

but hardly made a difference to the bucket.

Unfortunately I didn't find any red strings, just a couple of strips from which I could cut 2" squares
However, I found a few red triangles, probably the cut off corners of stitch and flip blocks, and some extremely odd shapes from which I cut the jagged edges.

Now I'm off to make crumb blocks from this treasure trove!

That was yesterday, ... and here they are!

These crumb blocks are destined to go onto a QAYG  basket for red scraps, but more about that later.
My plan is to make a basket each month and put that bucket back to its original use: hand laundry!

Last week I showed my outsize Jacob's Ladder blocks and now I have made three from the "other" Jacob's Ladder pattern that I had drawn from a photo by Sharon Mck Mason at 24 Quilts and which originated in "Better Homes and Gardens" but I don't know when. Incidentally I don't think it bears much resemblance to the original Jacob's Ladder, except for the diagonal line of squares; if anyone knows this block by another name please let me know.

For size comparison here are the blocks together:

I'm linking this to 

      

 Click on the button to see more photos of scrappy patchwork.

Happy sewing

Marly.

RSC 17 February aqua

Angela at soscrappy gave aqua as the colour for February and this week I made a few more 9-patches and some half hour-glass blocks as leaders and enders
 

Leaders and Enders!

and a couple of Jacob's Ladder blocks.

12" Jacob's Ladder blocks, pattern from Quilter's Cache

I'm not really happy with these for my rainbow project this year because the blocks are too big and the pieces are too big: 4.5" strips don't count as scraps in my book, at least not in the length they need to be here. Bad choice!

However I did find a photo on Internet, labelled Jacob's Ladder, but a 4-patch variation with small triangles and lending itself much better to using scraps. I have drawn the pattern,

and shall be making it each month using either 2" or 2.5" strips in the month's colour for the "ladder" and another for the corner squares. Nothing to show yet but let's hope that this works!

The two blocks I have just made are going into the orphan box, but I plan on using them in a blue/teal/green and white quilt, and that won't come from my scrap box!

I'm looking forward to March's colour which is still a mystery now RED.

Linking on Saturday to

Click on the button to see more scrap fun.

Happy sewing

Marly.