Three Cheers for Red, White, and Blue!

Having finished my yellow Rainbow Scrap Challenge sewing for June, and not yet knowing what July's color would be, I decided to do some seasonal sewing this week, and pulled out some red, white, and blue.

The family of a quilting friend who passed away last year offered her stash for those of us in her quilting group to share, and since I love fabric with stars, I knew I would enjoy making something out of this collection.  We are invited up to my SIL's cabin this weekend, and I thought this would be the perfect fabric to make her a little something to say thanks for the invite.

After cutting some 2.5 by WOF strips into 4.5 inch bricks, I sewed them into a red, white, and blue table runner that I think will work nicely for a mountain cabin.  It measures about 17 x 29.

It was fun to pretend to decorate my own table for the holiday weekend with this table runner!

Of course, since I am in that "one thing leads to another" mode lately, I couldn't put the scraps from this project away and move on to something else, so I decided to keep going with red, white, and blue, and ended up with this little mini to keep for my house.

It was fun to start with, "I wonder if I could..." and end up with a (sort of) flag!  Since taking this photo, I've finished the quilting and will be stitching the binding down this evening while watching a little TV.

Have a fun and safe holiday weekend!  I'll be sharing this at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and on Sunday at Oh Scrap over at Quilting is More Fun than Housework.

I Like Thursday #36 - Inside and Outside

Welcome to I Like Thursday, sponsored by LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color!  I look forward to checking out the weekly posts written by the positive thinking community we've created here, and invite you to join us!

My first like of the week - all of you who commented on my question about whether or not to put water in my new iron.  Thanks for your input!  It seems that most people DON'T put water in their irons anymore, and use a spray bottle for spritzing the fabric instead, so that's what I've decided to do, too.  So far, that's working just fine!

I like going out to my garden and harvesting fresh lettuce for a delicious dinner salad!  Because our backyard is so shady, it's one of the few vegetables I can grow out there!

If you've read some of my previous I Like Thursday posts, you know that my husband and I like to explore the natural areas and open spaces that communities around northern Colorado have developed for all of us to enjoy.  Saturday, we went to a new one to us - Soapstone Prairie Natural Area  - which we really liked.

It is truly an amazing place where you can see forever; full of wildflowers, birds, and butterflies.

We've gotten pretty good at identifying birds we see, but it was a new experience to try to identify this butterfly.  They were all over the place as we walked!

We think this is a type of Fritillary.  In researching it, I think there are 6 different types of fritillaries in Colorado, and they all look a lot alike!

On another day, we spent some time wandering around looking for yellow-headed blackbirds, and found them in a couple different open space areas.  They like to nest in the reeds by ponds, so if you know where to look, there they are!  They are beautiful birds!

Back at home, I've been sewing every day, and I really like my set of square OmniGrid Rulers that came with four different sizes.  I don't have many specialty rulers, but these have been a good purchase and I use them a lot!

Thanks for visiting!  Hope you are enjoying a great week!

Bits and Pieces

This really has been the week for me to sew with little bits and pieces!  Although it would take a long time to finish even a baby quilt with these small scraps, other things can be accomplished and creating them is lots of fun!

My Desert Bloom HSTs, leftover from the X's and O's table runner, turned into these coasters (or maybe I could call them mug rugs).

I found this fun fabric in my stash that reminds me of fireworks for the backing and binding.  These measure about 6 x 6.

I also made one more Marvelous Monday Mini block, pattern coming from Temecula Quilt Company.

And one other scrappy thing...  I've worked with a lot of low volume scraps recently - in my log cabin quilt and my string star project.  I use up the long pieces quickly, and am left with lots of chunks.  I've been wondering what to do with those chunks!

Then I saw THIS, friends.  It is a beautiful mini quilt made by Teje at Nero's Post, made with a low volume background and raw edge appliqued flowers.  I love it, and want to make something similar, inspired by Teje's work.  Perfect for those leftover chunks that don't really work in string piecing.

I started by sorting out all of the chunks from my black and white scrap bin, matching up pairs that were similar in size, and sewing them together.

After a little trimming, I was able to match up similar size pairs into groups of four, and so on, until I ended up with this nice piece!  It measures about 13.5 x 5.5.  Not very big, really, but probably a good size for me to experiment with some applique on!  I think I'll have fun looking through my colorful scraps for pieces to make stems, leaves, and flowers.

Sharing my little bits and pieces at Oh Scrap!, the Sunday link-up hosted by Cynthia at Quilting is More Fun than Housework!

When One Yellow Thing Leads to Another

A couple weeks ago, I showed this yellow monkey block, where I had fussy cut a little owl out of this fat quarter to make the center square.

And then, you know how it goes... I didn't put the owl fabric away, and the next time I noticed it, I had to make something more out of it.  So, it turned into this adorable 30 Minute Zipper Pouch!

This pouch deserves its own post, which I'll get to another day, but if you're curious about how to make one, you can find a free tutorial for it on Craftsy.

But then... since June is Yellow month in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and the leftover scraps from the pouch were just sitting there... I used some more to make a bow tie block!

I needed a couple more yellow bow ties, so I kept going, with other fabric - 

And that is my week in yellow!  

Here are all the bowties I've made so far this year.  I really like this layout, but of course, lots more are needed to make a quilt!  I'm just going to keep making them until I have enough for something!

Sharing over at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday.  Be sure to check out the rest of the Rainbow Scrap Quilters to see what they've doing with yellow this month!

I Like Thursday #35 - Summer!

Happy Summer, everyone!  I like summer!

I also like this pretty and festive barrel of petunias in my front yard that is very happy right now!

And all the green and growing things in my backyard garden.  The sunflowers and squash plants were planted by our local squirrel community.  Hopefully, we will benefit from them!

I LOVE that my husband got his first Hole in One on the golf course the other day!  He has been so excited about it!

I liked this ball of fluff who came to visit at our house the other day. His name is Peyton and he is a 2 lb, 8 week old, teacup Pomeranian.  And he likes to play with feet!

I liked the movie, "Wonder Woman!"  It has everything you need in a movie - the ultimate in good vs evil, a little love story, and lots of strong women to save the day!  You can just start calling me Diana from now on.

We also recently liked the movie, "The Way," on Netflix.  It's about a man whose son dies while hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, so he takes on the journey himself, and is changed by his experiences.  The main character is played by Martin Sheen (my favorite fantasy president!) and there are several other quirky characters who are enjoyable as well.  Completely different from "Wonder Woman," but very worth watching!

On Father's Day, I found this picture that I love of my dad and my youngest son, taken in 1985.  My dad died 25 years ago. and I still miss him every day.  It was also fun to pay attention to some of the changes in our backyard since this was taken.  The landscaping is all different now, and the house next door hasn't been dark brown like that for a very long time!

And now, I would *like* some advice from any or all of you!  I bought a new iron this week.  The old one was spitting out water from all the wrong places, and actually left a small brown stain on a table runner that I recently finished, so it was time for a new one.

Here's what I want your input on.  I am considering not putting any water in my iron, but instead using a spray bottle to spritz the fabric, or seams, or whatever, that I'm trying to iron, to create the steam effect.  I've read that this is better for your iron - and I'm wondering what you all do.  Let me know!  and Thanks!

Hope you're enjoying a summery week!  (Mary in Peoria, I'm thinking of you!:)  Please join the I Like Thursday posters over at Not Afraid of Color.  We have fun celebrating the positive in life each week!

X's and O's and a few scraps, too!

I finished up my X's and O's table runner last night.  I ended up using all of the stitch and flip corner squares that I made, 18 of them, and making a large rectangle.  It fits my dining room table really well.

I also like it outside on the table on our deck!

Kona Creamsicle (Doesn't that make you think summer?!) turned out to be a good color for the backing and binding.  I quilted it with horizontal curvy lines.

There were a whole bunch of bonus triangles left over from these blocks, so I sewed them into HSTs this week, and have been trimming them to 1.75 inches.  Tiny!  I don't know yet what I will do with them, but we need some new coasters for the table where we have coffee every morning, so I think that's where these will end up.

And speaking of tiny!  I, too, got hooked into trying the Temecula Quilt Company's Marvelous Monday Mini blocks.  I thought, Why not!  It's only scraps, after all!  Lol! 

My plan for these is to keep to an orange, turquoise, light blue, and lime green color scheme.  

We'll see what happens!

Sharing today at Oh Scrap! at Quilting is More Fun than Housework!

I Love Yellow!

The perfect color for the month of June - lovely, sunny yellow!  I spent some time this week stitching up some yellow string blocks for my String Star.

I needed 8 of them, and it wasn't too long before they were finished up and trimmed.

Sewing with sunshine!

Look what's happening!

The pile of strings is growing!

For more sunshine-y goodness, check out all of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilters at the ScrapHappy Saturday link-up, over at SoScrappy.

I Like Thursday #34 - Escaping the Craziness

The world outside my little house can be a mystifying, confusing, and sometimes downright scary place.  I think a lot of people are feeling that way these days.  We all have our own ways of handling those kinds of feelings - I tend to like to escape.  Into my sewing room, into a good book, into a show on Netflix.  There are so many ways.  :)

I really liked this book by Mitch Albom.  Our book club chose it to read for our June discussion, and it is really wonderful.  If you are musically trained, or even just enjoy music, I think it would be a good read for you!

My favorite quote from this book - "Everyone joins a band in this life.  And what you play always affects someone."

I liked this TED talk by Anne Lamott. It's called "Twelve Truths I Learned from Life and Writing."  One of the things she says that I loved is, "Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful gift, and it is impossible here." Life is "filled with sweetness and beauty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together."

Precious and unfathomable.  Yes.

I like escaping to the big city once in awhile.  (We live in a small city of about 60,000, about an hour's drive from Denver, Colorado.)  One of our favorite escapes is to go to a baseball game at Coors Field to see the Colorado Rockies play.

One day last week we drove to the closest light rail station, boarded the train, and headed to downtown Denver.

Waiting for the train - 

The walk to 20th and Blake - 

Play ball!  (and our team won, which makes it all the more fun!)

I like a pretty bowl of fruit!  Yummy!

I like puppy stories, especially because I don't have one!  (teehee!)  Like LeeAnna's posts about the Misadventures of Milo.  Also, my friend, Linda, who doesn't blog, but often sends me photos of her Golden Retriever puppy, Grace, who does fun things like chew up the newspaper.  "No news is good news!?!"

A favorite blog to read is Darling Millie.  Millie is a beautiful cat, rescued by Lynne of The Patcherie Menagerie, and Millie has her own blog!  Lots of fun to see life through a cat's eyes!  :)

And, last but not least, while I am on an animal kick - I like this photo of my ScrapJar Stars quilt at our local sculpture park.

Happy (almost) Thursday, everyone!  Hope you are finding ways to be positive in these mystifying times!  I will be joining the other I Like Thursday bloggers over at LeeAnna's place, Not Afraid of Color, for our weekly get-together to celebrate the good in life!

X's and O's

Sometimes you see a project another quilter has done and it inspires you to try something similar - which is what happened to me when I saw this pretty table runner made by Vicki of Vicki's Crafts and Quilting.  A charm pack is the perfect size and amount of fabric for a table runner, and I happened to have one of Desert Bloom by Sheri and Chelsi of A Quilting Life for Moda.

I really like the summery feel of this pretty fabric, so I decided to split the charm pack into darks and lights, and use the peach, gold, and blue tones for my table runner.

One thing I love about Vicki's table runner is that it's made out of one simple block, a square with stitch and flip corners.  I am using the light fabrics from the charm pack for the corners of my blocks and the darker ones for the centers.  I made 18 of these blocks.

It has been a lot of fun to play with these blocks and decide what kind of layout I wanted.  I used the table that the table runner would be displayed on to decide what would work the best.

Just a single row of X's and O's, using 16 blocks?

A square shape?

Or a bigger rectangle that uses all 18 squares?

It's so fun to play with color and shape!  Today I'm hoping to finish this little piece up, so I'll show you how it turned later this week.  Have a great week everyone!

Sharing over at Oh Scrap! at Quilting is More Fun than Housework.

Monkeys on the Move

This little yellow-ish monkey block (made in the multi-color month of April!) popped up the other day and insisted that I make him some yellow buddies.

So I did, and now he is much happier.  I had a bit of fun fussy cutting some 1.5 inch squares for the centers of these two blocks.  There are now 34 monkeys in my little tin!

And in other yellow monkey business, I was looking through my yellow scraps and found quite a bit of Kona Maize left over from... something.  

I decided to start adding some sashing to the monkey blocks with 2 inch strips along with 2 inch randomly scrappy corner stones. They will look something like this - 

I'm going to enjoy seeing what happens with these little guys next!

To see what other scrappy quilters have been doing with their yellow scraps this week, check out the Scrap Happy Saturday link-up at Soscrappy!