The last of the orange

Happy 1st of June!

To finish up May's orange sewing this week, I've focused on the orange blocks for my Beothuk Star QAL.

This photo makes the pretty floral look very pink, but when I'm looking at it as I'm sewing it really reads as a corally - orange with bits of yellow, pink, and red in it.

The orange star is sewn together now, as is one of the purple ones.  I'm getting there!

I also made this week's Tiny Tuesday butterfly block out of these fun scraps!

I thought the sewing themed dark gray would make a fun butterfly body!

Looking at my butterfly now, if I were to do it over again, I would adjust where I placed the body, but I know in the whole quilt, that isn't something I'll worry about!

To end the month, I put up all my blocks on the design wall.  Somehow I've ended up with 25 blocks.  (Plus two reject blocks that I didn't even include here!)

You can see my design wall is pretty full right now!

Now I'm ready to play with blue in June!

Sharing at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday!

I Like Thursday #136 - Out and About

In between rain showers and cloudy, cool days this last week, we managed to get out and about for a few favorite activities.

Saturday, on our way to a family graduation party, we stopped off at a local open space to see if the Yellow-headed Blackbirds had come back for the summer yet.

And there they were!  They are such beautiful birds, and have a very loud and noticeable call, too!

Mike's photo with his fancy camera!

On Monday, we were wanting to go for a hike somewhere, but seeing that storms and hail were in the forecast for the afternoon, it needed to be somewhere fairly close.  We ended up at a beautiful (paved) trail that follows along the Poudre River, west of Fort Collins.

Lots of big trees and bushes along the river make for great bird habitat, and we saw some birds that were new for us, which we always like!

But the coolest view was this one -

Hope you can see it - right in the middle - it's a Golden Eagle nest!  Huge!  This photo was taken from across the river, looking way up.

Meanwhile, back at home, my Columbine are starting to bloom!

I'm always so happy to see them, and wish they lasted all year.

We enjoyed this movie on Netflix the other night.

Morgan Freeman is especially good in it!

And I've finished up the neutral border on this hexie tablerunner that I've been working on forever!

I think I'm ready to finish it off, but have to decide how.  It measures about 33.5 x 14. Should I baste it with batting and backing, and quilt it before trimming the edges straight for the binding?  Since it's all hand-pieced,  I'm planning to hand quilt it.  I want to use the same Grunge Dot fabric that makes the neutral border for the binding so that it extends that color.

Hope you're having a great week!  I'm joining in with LeeAnna and the other "I Like Thursday" bloggers at Not Afraid of Color today.  Thanks for visiting!

On my design wall this week...

While continuing to work on the blocks for the Beothuk Star QAL, hosted by Sandra at mmmquilts, I couldn't resist making more International Sisters blocks!

Some of them are even made from the leftovers of Beothuk Star!

These are a great block for scraps because you can make the headdress, sleeves, and skirt out of a pretty small piece - about 7 x 14 inches at the most - for a 10.5 inch block.  Then you just need a little chunk for the face and hands and some background fabric.  I'm using a piece of Kona White that was left from making my Squared Away blocks, last year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge sampler.

I've had fun working on my sisters in between sewing HSTs for Beothuk Star.  (All the while, listening to the Friendship Album podcasts!)

What will I do with these colorful ladies?  Stay tuned!

If you want to make some International Sisters, check out Sew Preeti Quilts, right HERE.

Sharing at Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!  

This week in orange...

Our Tiny Tuesday block for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was a rail fence block.  It was fun working with some little strips of orange and this pretty background fabric!

Thanks, Angela, for the directions for this block!  They can be found HERE. 

I think I might like this block better set straight rather than on point, but I can change my mind about that later in the year if I want.

Here are my three orange blocks for May, including a redo of last week's Bearclaw Bowtie.   I like it much better than the first one I made!

I also finished up an orange Tiny Rail block.

I've made three of these, each using different orange scraps.

And now I have 20 Tiny Rails blocks!  I started making these blocks as a way to use up the smallest scraps I have.  There are 50  (1.5 x 2.5 inch) pieces in each block, so 1000 little pieces all together! 

I'm still thinking I need 30 of these 10.5 inch blocks to make a good size lap quilt - it will be about 50 x 60.  So 10 more to go!

Sharing at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday.

I Like Thursday #135

Oh good grief!

That's what I said on Tuesday morning, when we woke up to this view out into our yard.

You know how the weather folks predict it, but you just can't quite believe it will really snow on May 21st?!  That was me.

In an effort to think of the positive side of this rain and snow we've been getting, I have to say the moisture is always appreciated around here, the grass is very green, and the birds love it, too.  I am also thankful there weren't tornados around here, like in so many parts of the country.

Needless to say, there hasn't been much outdoor activity at our house this week, other than to cover the garden plants and flowers every night, and uncover them when it was warm enough the next day!  But it has been good reading weather!

I've finished three books in the last 10 days or so, and I liked them all!

 

   

Each is a little bit different genre - I like Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache mystery series, and this was book 7.  Now I'm waiting for the next one!  Alafair Burke is a favorite author who writes mysteries also.  The Wife is one of those psychological thriller types where you're never quite sure who's the good guy and who's the bad guy, and there's often a twist at the end!   You, Me, and the Sea is realistic fiction that has a bit of a Wuthering Heights feel to it - cliffs, orphans, long-lost loves - but set in modern day San Francisco, a location I enjoy reading about.    

It's been good sewing weather, too, and among other things I've made some good progress on my blue and white hand-pieced blocks.  There are eight finished now, and I'm working on number 9!

This is called the HST block in the Hand-Pieced QAL, but I'm wondering if it has a traditional block name.  Does anyone know?

We've been enjoying a New Zealand series, "The Brokenwood Mysteries," on Acorn TV most evenings.  I like the main characters a lot, and am so fascinated with their accents!

And I just had to laugh when an order of Olfa rotary cutter blades came in the mail the other day!  I usually order a package of 5 whenever we're ordering other things from Amazon, because their price is the best I can find.  Here's how they came!

That's 5 of them, all right!!!

Hope you're having a great week!  Wishing everyone sunshine and warm weather and a great Memorial Day weekend!

Join me at Not Afraid of Color to visit the other I Like Thursday bloggers.

That "Aha!" Moment

I love that point, when you're figuring out a quilt pattern, that you're able to say, "So that's how that's made!"  I had that happen this week as I began to work on block construction for my Beothuk Star QAL.

While still sewing and trimming the HSTs that are needed for this quilt, at which I am painfully slow -

on Wednesday, I read Sandra's post about constructing the first blocks.  Find it HERE.  That's when the Aha happened!  I pulled out my color-coded diagram of the version I'm making, and started outlining the basic block.

And then, here it is in my pieces and parts!

Before too long, I had one of the purple stars laid out on my design wall.

Since I am making the version where two stars are the same color (in my quilt, they'll be purple), I ended up laying out both of them side by side.

These will be the bottom left and top right quadrants of the quilt, and are (I think!) mirror images of each other.

I really like this gray fabric that has tiny squares of all of the other colors sprinkled throughout!  It is part of each of the four main stars, but also creates a center star as well.  

Now I'm ready to sew some stars together!

And that's what I'll be working on this afternoon!  

Sharing at Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap, and at

mmmquilts for the Beothuk QAL link up where everyone is sharing their progress!

Two Tiny Tuesday Blocks Today

Say that five times fast!

I've been awash in little bits of orange this week -

First to catch up with last week's block, shared with us by Angie at Quilting on the Crescent.

The Road to _______ (Angie says insert your destination here.)

I'll call mine The Road to Colorado, since that's where I live!

Next up was this week's block from Sally at The Objects of Design, called  Bear's Bowtie.  Be sure to look at Sally's version, because mine does not quite do it justice, mostly because of poor fabric choice on my part!  ;(

I think those are snakes who are after whatever the bear has in its claws, lol!

This one may be redone, but that will have to wait for another post...

Both blocks - 

And all of my Tiny Tuesday blocks, so far!

Plus, a few little bricks for another orange Tiny Rails block were made as leaders and enders.

Hope you've had fun with your orange scraps this week!  Linking up with Soscrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday!

I Like Thursday #134 - Flowers

Welcome back to "I Like Thursday," our weekly celebration of the positive things in life!  Thanks, as always, to LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color for getting us started on this journey.

I loved all the interesting plants that were growing everywhere we went in San Diego.  This pot was in the courtyard of our hotel.

Luckily for me, Mother's Day means it's planting time where I live, so that's what I've been working on this week!  Although I would not say I have a green thumb, I do enjoy planting things each year and adding color to my yard!

Tiny to begin with, but they will fill up this big pot before too long!

And while we were at it, we planted some veggies in the new raised bed garden planter.

Hoping these will bring us fresh tomatoes and peppers later in the summer!

Meanwhile, in the sewing room, I've been playing with flowers, too.  This pretty orange/coral fabric is part of my Beothuk Star QAL project, and since I didn't need all of it for the HSTs I needed to make, I decided it would make a great headdress and skirt for one of Preeti's International Sister blocks.

My lady has sparkly age spots, lol - just like her maker!

I also liked getting caught up on the parts I needed to make for Carole's Scrap Dance Minuet mystery over at From My Carolina Home.

There are bricks, flying geese, and four patches involved.  I'm making the table topper size out of my August Blogger Bundle that Carole curated for Needle and Thread Fabrics last year.  There are a couple of pretty florals in this bunch, too.  Since I bought half yards, I'll have enough to make one of these for my mom, whose birthday is in August!

Happy Mail arrived the other day in a package from Sandra at mmmquilts who is sponsoring the Beothuk Star QAL.  I won a charm pack of this pretty fabric that has yellows, grays, and black.

This will be fun to play with!  Thank you, Sandra!

And, finally, it was fun to see the first goose mama and papa with their babies at the golf course yesterday.

Little fuzzy goslings, and very protective parents!

Happy Thursday, friends!  Hope you're having a great week!