Green Grows

I have sewn together the top half of the Green Deco quilt. As I was working the other blocks fell off the design wall. I wasn't really worried, I knew I would design it again once I got the top half sewn up. So that was next.

This is what I will sew tougher, barring any other karmic accidents.

I'm sewing this together in chunks.

This quilt is prettier, and greener, in real life.

My Mom and her boyfriend came over for dinner last night. I had made some pulled pork so we had pulled pork sandwiches with coleslaw. I also made an ice cream cake - basically I made a variation of a recipe I found online. I made mine smaller, used Dulce de Leche instead of peanut butter, almonds instead of peanuts, and I added some toffee bits to the ice cream between the crunchy layers. And then I added toasted sliced almonds to the top. My Mom sure does love her ice cream. Me, ice cream is OK, but not to-die-for. I gave her the cake to take home.

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Green Deco Shifts

 

I have been making more blocks for the green deco quilt, but it seemed a little bit disjointed. I like the green but the colored blocks didn't seem to be giving me the look I was looking for.

I had liked the way the blue and teal blocks looked when I removed the others and put the blues together I liked it.

So I removed all the colored squares from the blocks and then replaced them with blue and teal squares.

Here are all the new blocks on the wall. It's funny, but the quilt looks greener with the blue squares instead of the colored ones.

As for the office clean up, I've got a big chunk of the room clean and organized. I need a stepladder to get to the top shelf of the bookcase, so that will be later when I clean out the top shelf of the closet. The closet is 75% done, and I am pretty happy with the results so far. I really want to get it done this week because I have to prepare for my letters class next week.

The Office Update

 

I've been faithfully working in the office every day and now my desk, and the file drawers under it, are all organized and cleared of clutter.

I've donated a lot of my "older" Art books to a local Art teacher. I haven't opened them in ten years, so there was no point in keeping them. If they can be used, and they will be, I am very happy for them to go. Now I can organize the bookcase.

I also gave away my big easel. I can't use it, so has gone to an Artist who loves to paint. She was overjoyed.

Here's an Action Shot of a Quilt at Work. This is my son and granddaughter playing a game at the park on one of my quilts. Heartwarming in so many ways.

Green Deco

 

I decided to make a Green Deco quilt to match the Spring Birds quilt of the birds with the light green backgrounds. 

The quilt is from Amy Walsh & Janine Burke's book, "Colorful Quilts for Fabric Lovers," and has two very simple blocks. I needed a lot of strips, so I cut a collection of lightish light greens.

Here are some of my first blocks, thrown on the design wall in no particular order. I already know I am going to like this, but it will look a lot better once I have a lot more blocks.

For the last day of school, my granddaughter decided to wear her "very best favorite dress" - the dress I made for her using Seminole Patchwork. You can click the link for my tutorial on basic Seminole patchwork.

Needless to say her description of the dress made my day!

Slow but Steady- update with photo!

 Well I upgraded something on my computer and it won't let me upload any photos, so until I get that worked out, you'll have to use your imagination and I will have to be very descriptive!

Fortunately I do not have anything Quilty to show you.

I have been diligently spending an hour in my office each day, clearing out old stuff. I spent two days going through the contents of one file drawer, sorting what I wanted to keep, and shredding a lot of personally identifiable very old stuff. I have gone through three drawers of the bureau and got rid of maybe 50 pens and a dozen highlighters. I've cleared out the container I use for tubes of wrapping paper and discovered that something sticky had fallen into the container and some of the items in it were covered in whatever it was. Now that's been sorted and the container has been cleaned.

I have asked a friend to recommend a local art teacher so I can donate some old art books, and I've sorted those.

I've gone through the shelves in my bookcase and removed what I no longer want.

I'm putting all the old electronic devices in one pile so I can get rid of them all at the same time.

I've decided to donate the painting easels I have to the college where I got my degree. I'll call them tomorrow to see if they are interested in receiving these items and find out when I can drive over and deliver them.

I've done a lot of work and the room still looks messy! No real surprise there, though. 

I really enjoyed the Men's Final between Jannick Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz at the French Open Championships at Roland-Garros on Sunday. It was a tense five set match that lasted over five hours. I worked on a jigsaw puzzle (that I can't show you) while I listened.

I've got the studio clean enough so I can start adding the binding to the brown Kangamangus quilt. I'll "watch" television as I sew.

Speaking of which, I have discovered a terrific show on Amazon Prime Video. It's called Extraordinary Portraits. Artists are paired with sitters and do their portrait. We hear about the sitter and the artist. They get to know each other and a portrait is created. Now if you are an artist, like me, and you used to specialize in portraits, as I did, this is fascinating stuff. You may not be so interested, but I have loved watching. I'm going to hate for it to be over.

I'm not done with Vera. I only watch one episode each day (kind of tough to watch more in one sitting) and I'm up to season 11. I've already watched seasons 13 and 14, but I will re-watch them when I get there.

I've really been enjoying Colleen Cambridge's mystery series. Both of them. She has one where here protagonist is Agatha Christie's housekeeper and the other is a friend of Julie Child, back when Julia was studying cooking in France. I'm all caught up with both, and only recently figured out that both series are the result of the same author. The first of the Phyllida Bright one is Murder at Mallowan Hall, and the other is Mastering the Art of French Murder.

That's it for now.

Critical Mess

 I was talking to my friend about being retired, and she said it takes about a year to figure it all out, and I have come to believe she is right.

My whole working career I was doing so many things at once that I always kept a very well stocked kitchen pantry, but now that just seems a bit ridiculous, so I have been meticulously planning my menus and only buying ingredients I need for the meals I have planned. I figure it's going to be a while before I get down to the bare shelves, and it will be MUCH easier to find things in my freezer, but that's my plan. The side bonus is that my grocery bills have been much smaller, and that's been fun.

While working through my pantry, which lives in the closet in my office, I've also realized I've got papers and boxes and stuff in there that needs cleaning out, so I've been spending an hour in there each day going through stuff. Today I found a stack of old pay stubs from 2018!! Needless to say those went directly into the shredder.

There are Art books I may never need, so I have to rethink all those too. And I found, count them, NINE boxes of notecards! I think getting that room reorganized will take all summer. That's OK. It's overdue. I've got a TV in there, and I can stream something mindless while de-cluttering, so I don't feel like a lazybones when I sit down on the couch and actually WATCH something.

I've been listening to the tennis at the French Open (Roland Garros) and that's always fun. It means I haven't been getting as much reading done, but that's fine too. I have to keep telling myself that I am retired, and I earned this time off, so I don't have to feel guilty if I am not as "productive" as I used to be.

I don't know what my next quilt project will be, but I have decided to let that sit for a bit and not worry about it.  (Ergo, pillow covers.)

I've also been writing the quilt stories of quilts I have gifted in the past. That's been fun and interesting. I'm glad I was blogging because half the time I go back and read about what I was doing and discover things I had completely forgotten.

The garden is shaping up. The zucchini is doing well, as are all my herbs, but the basil and some of the peppers do not seen to like being planted in the ground. So I moved them to pots and have my fingers crossed.

I have been trying to walk at least a mile each day. Very easy in my neighborhood, except for when it rains. After my walk, I water the garden. On not so hot days I go out later and weed and do the other things the garden requires,

As I was cleaning the studio after my pillow cover making extravaganza, I found this fabric. Don't remember WHY I bought it (except that it so reminds me of Millie...) but I realized it would make a perfect pillow. So I stopped cleaning and made the pillow. 

Working on a jigsaw puzzle is the perfect thing to do while listening to the radio. This is the most recent.

So that's what's been happening in my neck of the woods.

Pillows

 

I have a different quilt for my dining table for each month of the year. I also rotate the quilts on the back of the couch. I also have a small lumbar pillow on the red orange side chair. I have made pillow covers for that too.

I only had about two or three, and I decided I had to make some that would relate to the quilts on the couch. So these fabrics represent these quilts: (Counterclockwise from the top) Kangamangus, the Pink Panther, Nightingale #3, Carnelian, Peppermint Twirl, Golden Zebra and the Needle in a Haystack.

The pillow is pretty easy to make, it's a long rectangle of fabric 11" x 39" and I had to hem the short ends over. 

I cut notches in one of my business cards so I wouldn't have to use a ruler. 

After hemming the short ends, the fabric folds over and the long sides are sewn together. There are no zippers or fastenings in this pillow.

After turning the pillow inside out, it looks like this. You can see the opening in the photo above.

Here are the eight pillows I made. I added the green pillow cover at the lower left. I'll use this when I set out the quilt with the birds on the light green backgrounds.

This and That

 

I have white irises in my garden. I was heading out to get my haircut yesterday and I looked at them and thought... oh, I should bring them to my hairdresser, Jen, so I went back inside and got scissors and cut a stem for her.

When I got there, another customer looked at the stalk of irises in my hand and asked if they were real.

"Yes, I just cut them." She replied she'd never seen irises quite so big. 

When I handed them to Jen a few minutes later she was absolutely delighted, and stuck them in the vase with a Rhododendron flower and some Bleeding Hearts. What's funny is they looked like they were designed to be there.

Irises don't last long, but I thought Jen would enjoy looking at them for at least one day!

I'm teaching a Birds class at Night Owl Quilting Studio on Saturday, so I've been getting ready for that.

I've finished planting the herbs in my garden, and got a hanger and macrame hanger for a spider plant that I'll be putting out on the front porch over the weekend.

Otherwise I've been listening to the tennis at Roland Garros and streaming Vera and Top Chef.

Next up is finishing the Kangamangus quilt.

99% done...

 

When I designed the top half of the quilt I think will be called Spring Chatter (thank you Elle), I knew I didn't want the birds stacked up neatly one on top of the other. I wanted some taller and some shorter. And I knew I wanted them spread out a bit.

With WOW (White on White) fabrics this would have been a lot easier. I could not introduce any green fabric that was not already in the quilt, and I had to spread them around and still not make any area too light or too dark.

Working on the floor was both easier and harder. Easier because I could reach it, harder because I could not see the whole thing.

When I started sewing it together I knew how to do the bottom part, but had no clue how I would approach the top. The only way forward is through, so I just started at one side and worked my way over. 

Originally there could have been five or six set in squares, but in the end there were only three. 

This was a rather large one, so I made sure to fussy cut it so it did not have any strong pattern in it.

Here is the top part almost sewn together. It needed to be sewn to the row underneath it, and then to the bottom part.

I still have to trim it a bit and make sure there is enough fabric all around so no bird loses his or her tail feathers in the binding, but this is it. My first thought after I put it up and went across the room to look at is was that I should have spread more different fabrics around on the bottom. But I think I will leave it as is (because I'm not going back) and because I kind of like it. It's as if the birds are in a tree and you can see more sky around them toward the top. That's my story and I am sticking with it.

Although the QUILT looks OK, the photos look darker and the quilt really isn't that dark, so I took it outside.

Yup. Works for me.

Building Blocks

 

The quilt is coming along, but the pieces are NOT sewn together. This is just how I think they are going to fit together and the fabrics I think will fit in the empty spaces.

Because I am short, and ladders and I are not always on the best of terms, I moved the top half of the quilt to the floor, so I can access the pieces more easily. This was rather tricky. You can see the large rulers which helped me work out the area I'm working with.

At this point the birds aren't lined up in regular rows, so everything is "fiddly."

An aside:

While I work in the studio I often stream something that provides some background noise. As I was working on this, I was streaming something called "Make It at Market," from BritBox. It's about professional craftspeople helping amateur crafters make the jump from amateur to Business Owner. We see various craftspeople describe their work. A basketmaker just described something as "fiddly." She was from Wales. So clearly the term "fiddly" has a more widespread use than my student last week imagined.

I'm glad I use pins and always check what I'm doing. Had I not used pins I would have sewn this wrong.

This is the upper right corner of the quilt. There is a set-in-square above the middle bird in the bottom row. There will be another one above the head of the bird on the lower left.

Here is where I am so far. It doesn't look like much, but there is so much thinking involved that it's really slow going.

I also got my vegetable garden going. It will be small, only one zucchini plant, one cucumber plant, a row of bush beans and a row of snap peas. I have a tomato plant, and one cherry tomato plant, and two pepper plants, one sweet and one spicy. All this in addition to the usual herbs that I plant every year in containers. I planted marigolds in the garden also. They are good companion plants for tomatoes and peppers.

Major Surgery

In yesterday's post, Julie pointed out that the two birds I have circled were on backgrounds that were too light, and they looked like a hole in the quilt.

She was absolutely correct. I'd have to remake both birds. 

Not a problem at all for the bird at the very top, as I hadn't sewn him to anything yet. You can see the revised bird above.

For the pink bird in the second row, however, it was a different story. I had to completely remove that bird block, create another one, and sew it back into place. I thought it would be easier to remove it and the adjacent bird first. This is one of those times where there is more than one way to do something.

Here is the replacement bird. I found those pink striped legs in my recycle pile and just had to use them. Otherwise I tried to duplicate the original bird.

Once I made the new bird, I had to cut it to the exact size of the original, and then sew it to the other bird I removed, and then sew them back into the row, and then sew the row to the other two rows.

Surgery complete. I am pleased to say the patient made a full recovery. I had thought the yellow bird to the left of the new pink bird was overwhelmed by the fabric surrounding him, and had previously made the decision to change that. I made that fix when I replaced the new bird.

I'm really wrestling with what to use to fill in the spaces between the birds. Sometimes a similar toned fabric just looks blah or dreary. I had to order more of some of the greens I had because I was literally running out of what I considered suitable options.

If you want to make birds, you can come to NH and take a class at the Night Owl Quilt Studio in Goffstown NH, or you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.

 

Fussing and Finagling

 I know I can sometimes make it LOOK easy, but it really isn't.

This is the left side of the fourth "row" up from the bottom of the Green Birds Quilt. (Thanks for all the great suggestions for titles by the way. I haven't chosen one yet.)

So yeah, ok, I have to add some fabric to the tops and sides of the blocks and then join them together so they are straight and square. Not so easy.

Anyway, I added the olive-y fabric to the bottom of the brown bird on the left and stuck it up on the wall and immediately had second thoughts.

I ignored them and went to work on the birds on the right side of the row. The great debate there was whether I should sew all five birds together in ONE row or raise the right side, in which case I would need a narrow set in square to get it all to fit the way I wanted. I can do that, no problem, but the size of the set-in square would be less than one inch tall, and that to me was excessively "fiddly."

I try to avoid "cute" and excessively fussy and "fiddly." (One of the students in my class last week told me that using that term, "fiddly," marked me as a native Granite Stater. That was new to me.)

I ended up replacing the offending strip of fabric before I got to the other problem.

So I decided, brilliant me that I am (speaking facetiously), I would trim 1/4" off the top of that three block panel, and then sew the two panels together, and then trim the excess 1/2" or so from the BOTTOM of that same panel.

Well you know damn well it wasn't quite THAT simple. Much fussiness and fiddling ensued. The air turned blue. Yes, I swore. Often and loudly. But I kept my cool and got it done.

AND WHEN I DID GET IT DONE, I put all my tools away and cleaned my worktables. I knew that staying OUT of the studio for the rest of the day would help me keep my sanity.

I haven't sewn that fourth row to the rest of the quilt yet. I have learned to avoid pushing my luck.

The next group will be at the upper right, and before I finish the top I expect to insert at least three set in squares. But one thing at a time, and one block at a time. This would have been much simpler if I had used WOW (white on whites) for the backgrounds of the birds, but been there done that, and I like to push boundaries, so here I am. I am more or less pleased with this.

And oh yeah, see that yellow bird, far left, second row from the bottom? He has WAY too much of that same fabric all around him and that will have to change.