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!

I Like Thursday #33

This week has been all about playing with my husband's new camera in different places.  He plays with it; I just go along for fun!  :)  I definitely enjoy the results of him having a new camera!

But first - I like finding things I thought I never had or had possibly lost!

I needed new needles for my sewing machine awhile back, and I was pretty sure I had bought them.  But all I could find was an empty container.  I figured I must have used them all up already.  But no... while cleaning and going through a pile of things, guess what I found!  I'm so excited to NOT have to go buy more right away!

One of the places we like to go (and Mike takes his camera) is a hike, especially up near Estes Park.  So we did that last Friday.  (These are my photos from the hike, not his, but you'll still get the idea!)

I always like the views from this trail.

I like seeing the fresh, spring-green leaves on the aspen trees.

I like seeing, and hearing, the water in a stream we crossed over.  I wish I had a way to let you listen to it, too!

I like hearing, and then also seeing, lots and lots of hummingbirds on this trail.

I like taking pictures of Mike taking pictures.  He enjoys it so much!

We always have a picnic at our favorite winery up in Estes after the hike is finished, and I really like that!

I hope you are all having a lovely week!  Happy Thursday!  Thanks to LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color for hosting our weekly positive posts!

Lemon or Lime?

There are so many enticing ideas out there in the quilting world - I have a list about a mile long of things I would like to try.   A pineapple block has been on my list for a long time, and when Patty from Elm Street Quilts showed this little mini she had finished up and linked up the tutorial for it, I knew it was time to make one!

I made the larger pineapple from the tutorial, and my completed mini measures about 9.5 x 14.

Not much was needed - some yellow and green scraps and a background fabric.  It went together so quickly that I even forgot to take any in process photos!

The perfect backing for it!

Love!

Perfect to hang up in my sewing room.  

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

A Last Bit of Green

Because I was so intent on finishing up my RSC 2016 Scrap Jar Stars quilt during May, I left the green blocks for this year's String Star project until the last few days.  But, once I pulled out the green scraps and got some foundation pieces cut, I was ready to go.

The eight blocks I need for the design I have in mind didn't take long at all!

String blocks are so much fun because they have so many possibilities!

This plan still needs orange and yellow blocks, plus lots more low volume background blocks, but it's always fun to check and see how everything is progressing!  Here's a little hint of it -

    - 

I did sew with a little bit of yellow this week - but more about that in my next post! :)

Sharing over at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday!