Big Finish for May!!

 Welcome to June!

In spite of feeling like I've been dragged through the last few days (too much heat, not enough levothyroxine in my opinion), I've finished off the month by reaching my quilting goals!

Two quilt tops have been finished for gifting and I eliminated three projects that have never gotten off the ground.

This sweet laprobe size quilt was pieced perhaps 20 years ago by one of my staff as a shop model.  I chose the fabrics and gave the top to her when I closed the shop.  She in turn gave it back to our charity quilt making group and we made a backing and layered it up and then I sat on it for several years. I didn't want it to go to just anyone.  Monday, because it was already layered, I pulled it off the shelf, threaded my machine and quilted it with simple diagonal lines following the design.  As I was quilting it, I thought of a friend who is coming up to the first anniversary of the death of one of her sons.  It's not hard to imagine what a tough year it's been for her and I hope this quilt will lift her spirits just a little.  Knowing that someone remembers the death of a loved one is a blessing.

This cutie is destined for a grand-nephew who will be arriving in August.  He will be growing up in a rural area and while the color scheme definitely does not blend with his mom's preferences,  I hope she will forgive me.  Rural boys need to see Holstein cows and pigs!!

Those of you who have attended one of my many UFO Assault Tactics lectures might recognize the center group of pineapple blocks as my much (maligned) opening UFO.  All those years, I used it to express my dislike for paper piecing which I've avoided steadily ever since making these blocks.  Many of you offered to remove the paper from the back (my main hang-up) but then I would not have had it to fuss about.  It was malingering in a stack of unfinished projects to be donated to my charity group but never quite made it out of the stack.  Then this delightful farm scene print appears and it was perfect!!  I quilted it with the Baptist fan which I think is an excellent choice for pineapple quilts.

Given the amount of time I've spent birding and gardening during May, I'm surprised I was able to stay on goal!!  

Do you see that big tub of plants on the left of the quilts? It's kale and kohlrabi.

Check out that little cabbage white butterfly mobile!  I stumbled across the idea last week on Instagram and the author has a sheet you can download from her website to make your own.  Apparently, cabbage whites are territorial and this little mobile "repels" them?  Right now we don't seem to have any cabbage whites around as they must have been knocked back by the cold spell earlier this month but I hope I'm ready for their return!

You can find it at simplelivingcollective.com and make your own if you want to try it, too.

They work on me (I've started to "chase" it off more than once), so I hope they will work on cabbage whites, too!!

Now if I could just find a simple way to repel chipmunks and deer!?!

Last fall, a friend brought me a large caterpillar which went into a cocoon almost immediately.  Over the winter, it "lived" between a window and a screen so it was outside but safe from predators.  I was beginning to get concerned since it had not emerged but then a couple days ago -- there she was!!

Not a luna moth as I originally thought, but a polyphemus moth.

None of my photos do her justice.  What appears to be a white margin along the black border at first glance is actually a light pink.

Those center circles in each "dot" are clear like cellophane.

Below is an underside view and look how beautifully she blends into the leaf litter.

(Look for the "dots".)

I hope she has found a mate -- I looked up the trees used as larval food by this moth's caterpillars and took to a woodland filled with those trees.

The spring woodland wildflowers are winding down here and it's time to explore meadows and fields to find summer wildflower beauties.  This is one of the most dramatic jack-in-the-pulpit blossoms I've seen this year.

Today, my friends and I are setting up our group veggie garden to grow produce and flowers to share with our church shut-ins -- it will be like a CSA for them.  We doubled our plot size and I hope we haven't been too ambitious.  

Then tomorrow we'll be celebrating the triplets third birthday!!

Hard to believe.  Boy, are they fun!!

I'll close with a Zen saying that is good to keep in mind --

"You should sit in nature for 20 minutes a day . . . unless you're busy.  

Then you should sit for an hour."

Mary

 

What's On Your "To-Do" List?

 Greetings from a sunny ( and balmy) snowy Northeast Ohio!!  

It's 37 degrees F. and after the cold days last week, it feels quite nice.  I might not even wear gloves outside today?!?  Yes, all those comedy routines and jokes about us apply when the winter sun is shining and it gets up to freezing!  We are on the downhill side of winter and the year round resident birds like cardinals and tufted titmice have started territorial singing as the daylight increases.  Hearing them cheers me right up and is a signal to my brain that spring is coming!!

How many new projects have you started this year so far?

I found one!!  It's Katja Marek's Homage to Grandmother's Flower Garden.  Have you seen it?  It's a stunning layout!  The pace is doable since the quilt is broken into 52 weekly sections.  I'm using 3/4" finished hexagons because it's larger than I want with the 1" that she has used.  And since I already have an EPP project going, I'm machine piecing this one using the Set-In Piecing Simplified chain piecing technique.  

To satisfy my "fussy cutting" itch (without starting yet another project), I chose this gorgeous floral from my stash to use for the center round of the large flowers.  It also has determined the color palette of rosy pink, golden yellow, and cornflower blue for the entire quilt.

Katja has designed the quilt with an interesting background but since I'm a devoted stash buster at this point, I'm working with a blended scrappy assortment of the palest blues I can find on the shelves.  To keep my momentum going down the road, I've precut lots of these blue hexagons so I can dive into each section without much effort.

My fussy cutting is rather casual but it still scratches my itch.

The trickiest part is inserting the leaves but after some fiddling with different approaches,  setting each one up as a unit like this seems to work best for me.  Sometimes that will mean pinning those pieces to the body of the top until an adjacent section is added but sewing the two background hexagons to the "weird" pieces and then to the leaf section with the final seam being between the two "weird" sections works well.  The "weird" shape is called "Marge's star" as it was introduced by the Aussie designer, Marge Sampson-George.

Isn't it delightful so far?!?

While I'm stuck on the next quilting step for that quilt I showed you in my last post, I've been moving some old UFO's forward.  If you ever attended one of my UFO Assault Lectures, you might recognize this little pineapple piece -- I finally took off the foundation papers and found this cute print in my stash for a wide border to bring it up to a usable size.

This old teaching step-sample is all stitched together and I'm auditioning borders today -- the pieced green border is settled but I'm waffling about a narrow accent border -- argh!!

It's all laid out on the floor just inside the sewing room and so hopefully, when I go back up there later today, one of the five choices I laid out will sing right out!

And I'll have another top to quilt!!

I'm excited to have all the units for parts 4 and 5 ready to add to my version of Jemina's Creative Quilting current mystery sew along!  I've become a regular Zoom webinar attendee for native plants and insect programs -- it's a great time to baste hexies, too!

So it might seem like all I'm doing is stitching?

That about sums it up -- mostly all I'm doing is stitching.  But I think I've stumbled onto a more upbeat strategy for not feeling guilty about it.  For some (inspired?) reason, I didn't make a "to-do" list last week?!?   Instead, I did "got-it-done" lists at the end of each day.  Everyday there were two or three household chores done plus the stitching and no guilt.  It amounted to the same amount of daily housework and sewing as usual, but not having the "to-do" list guilt was great!! Soooo, the "to-do" list will only have notations for tasks I might forget and very few deadlines.  

Up with the "got-it-done" lists because accomplishments build positive momentum!!

And that's a good thing!

Have a guilt-free week!!

Mary

One Week Down! Fifty-one To Go

 It's Saturday afternoon and the first week of 2022 has come and is almost gone.  What's that old adage -- start the year the way you mean to go?  I might have set the mark a little too high?

On Monday/Tuesday I pulled out the folding table and layered up three small quilt tops and two table runners (with Harry's help, of course).  

Two of the quilts were lurking in a bin of UFO's I had set aside for my charity group over the course of the past year, but when I re-homed all those supplies during the fall they must have been hiding?!?  Since I'm not going to lead a charity quilt making group any longer, I was peeved with myself for overlooking the projects, but on second thought, I'll still make charity quilts on my own.  So as a kick-start for the year, I finished piecing the easiest one (took an entire afternoon?!?) and organized backing for it and a second top that was already finished.

The third quilt top was the only top I pieced in 2021.  I used a newish pattern, Vanity Flair, from Karen Ackva at www.easypatchwork.de who quilts and teaches in Germany. You can find it in her ETSY shop HERE.  It's a sweet little quilt and I used up most of one of the (irresistible) layer cakes in my stash.  I cut it out in July . . . . 

. . . . . and then used it as "leaders and enders" whenever I needed a piecing break from all the quilting.

Isn't it sweet?  I'm stuck (as usual) about how to quilt it but something will come to me!?!

I think it will go onto the stack of quilts ready-to-gift.

Today, I finished quilting this one -- a teaching sample from Marti Michell's Volume Six patchwork book using her large Multi-size Hexagon Ruler.***  I kept the quilting simple to complement the piecing.  

Complex quilting would not only take longer but it would disappear into all the lovely Oriental theme prints which carry the show on this quilt.

The second one is a sweet little 9-patch single Irish chain quilt that will be a delightful charity quilt.

So two little quilts ready to bind this coming week!

Over the past couple weeks I've done lots of tidying in my sewing room -- putting fabric away, cutting  scraps into 2 1/2" strips and squares, unearthing UFO's, sorting through leftover batting, "finding" lost tools -- and as usual the UFO list is longer than I expected.  BUT for the first time in many years, it's under 50 projects.  I haven't set any hard and  fast goals for 2022 but I do want to eliminate as many of those UFO's as possible.  Many of them are small projects that started out as teaching samples (and they won't get bigger) but a few are just stacks of wishful thinking -- pattern/book and fabric. 

 I'm thinking I'll aim for finishing two a month and eliminating one a month but that's not written in stone because the idea of eliminating 12 projects this year that I thought I wanted to make is a bit . . . . . I don't know -- intimidating?   I think the key will be to decide if after laying on the "to-do" pile for years, what will I do with it if I make it?   

And eliminating something old will give me time to try something new that is more appealing at the moment!!  Must remember that!!

Now back to editing and revising one of my birding presentations -- being all bird nerd and dropping down into every rabbit-hole I encounter.

Hope your New Year is starting off as you'd like!!

Mary

***EDIT April 2025

Marti Michel closed her business in late in 2024 and while some shops may still have a stock of her templates, you can also find them on Ebay and Etsy.