It's a Finish! Fall Festival

Fall Festival

Celebrating the joy that comes from jumping into a big pile of colorful leaves. 

60 x 75

It's a finish! 

(Pardon the blurry photos. I was dodging raindrops and trying to hurry.)

It all started a few years ago with a six inch Chunky Churn Dash swap with a fall theme. 

You can also kind of see my free motion machine quilting on my DSM in this photo. I quilted tree branches with leaves horizontally across the quilt. 

I assembled four Chunky Churn Dashes, some Flying Geese and a 3 inch Nine Patch into a 15 inch block and when I ran out of Chunky Churns I substituted some framed four patches in a couple of blocks. 

Some alternate patterns emerged when the blocks were assembled into a top like four Chunky Churns bordered by Flying Geese with 9 Patch cornerstones or even some simple four patches. 

 Here you can see a little more of the leafy tree branch quilting. I used a scrappy binding. 

The backing was a soft flannel sheet from the thrift store. I had to let the seams out a little bit in order for it to be big enough.   I pieced together leftover batting for use in this quilt. 

This will go into the donation/gift stash which is very low at the moment. When the time is right it will go to a new owner. 

This was my goal #10 

for 

Q2 Finish-Along

I participated in four Chunky Churn swaps in order to challenge myself to make quilts with different layouts.  This was quilt number 3. The first two follow. 

CCD #1 -  The patriotic themed Chunky Churns were combined with snowballs and orphan blocks in a patriotic theme. It was a Quilt of Valor for my brother-in-law. 

CCD #2 - Chunky Churns in 30s fabrics. I combined them with another old swap - calico spools and actually made a border which is unusual for me.

I have one more to go - floral Chunky Churns. 

Oh Scrap! at Quilting is More Fun than Housework

Not Everything is Coming Up Roses

I found my missing bottle of Best Press. It's been missing for a long, long time. 

I was going to work on my Rosebud quilt, a very old UFO. The box of rose themed fabrics resides under my ironing board. It never did get closed up but I have instead piled things on top of the open box. And then I piled more things on top of those things until the pile got as high as the ironing board and I could pile no more.   (Did I mention I have a small sewing space? I must insert that here now lest you think I'm a slob).  Yesterday I unpiled stuff to get into my rose themed fabrics and to my dismay there was the missing bottle of Best Press and it was empty. It has been slowly leaking for a long, long time on to my rose themed fabrics and where it has been slowly leaking there was mold or maybe it is mildew...whatever, it was gross and kind of growing on top of bunches of rose themed fabrics.  Yuck.   So, I found a new box to pack up the undamaged fabrics and went about trying to salvage the rest.  There weren't lots of big spots on anything except the top piece of fabric - just little furry spots here and there on lots of fabrics.     I gave the mildewy fabrics  a good soaking for several hours in Oxyclean.   Then I rubbed laundry detergent into the spots if I could still see them and scrubbed the backside of the spots with a toothbrush.   Then I washed the fabrics adding 1 cup of vinegar to the wash water.   Then I hung them out to dry in the sun where they still hang today.   I haven't closely inspected the fabrics yet. I think the longer they hang in the sun the better. 

In the meantime...

 A long time ago I thought maybe I'd experiment with a different layout for the 12 inch Rosebud blocks than the usual "just-sew-lots-of-blocks- together" layout.  

So this morning I made some HSTs out of a green rose fabric and another limey green tone on tone fabric I now think I don't really like.  Let's call those HSTs "thorns" for now.     One of the layouts I thought of was off setting the blocks in columns with some thorns in between columns.  No design wall here but I kind of propped some up on my old cutting mat covered with batting.  See above. 

Nope...does nothing for me. 

Let's try again without columns of roses offset. 

Nope...does nothing for me. And I'm kind of hating looking at that lime green too. 

Ok. How about set on point and surrounded by thorns? 

I really really hate that lime green now but so far like this setting best. 

Maybe if I turn the thorns around?   That lime green is really distracting. 

Maybe I should just use the usual "just-sew-lots-of-blocks- together" layout and forget about thorns...at least for now. 

I'll think on it for awhile out in the garden. 

Gone gardening...