15 Minutes to Stitch Week Four

 It is going to take me some practice to remember to post my progress on the 15 Minutes to Stitch challenge every week.  I have been stitching every day though.  

I've shown you some of the quilting from this month already on the blog:

• The Project quilting challenge #1 where I made An Open Space to Breathe (I originally wrote that as A Quiet Place to Breathe, which is also a good name)
• The project Quilting challenge #2 where I made Change
• The bunkbed blanket I am repairing
• The peacock made with leftovers from the Lupine & Laughter mystery
• The Lupine & Laughter mystery

Since then, I have made a little more progress on each of the unfinished projects aforementioned.

But that's not all.  I found a group on Facebook that is making a Jane Stickle block a week, and I've made a couple of Jane Stickle blocks with them.

I have also started a small mystery quilt by Kathleen Tracy. I am very tempted to start a lot of quilts, but have been resisting, but I think this small quilt shouldn't take too much time. Plus it uses the tiny extra fabric from the Lupine and Laughter mystery quilt. The tiny blocks are the Valentine's mystery quilt and the bigger HSTs are from Lupine & Laughter.

• 15 minute days/Jan = 24/24 days
• 15 minute days/2026 = 24/24days
• Success rate = 100%

Linked with Kate's Life in Pieces 15 Minutes to Stitch.

Did You Miss It?

A4

It was Pi Day, then it was Saint Patrick's Day, then it was National Quilting Day, then it was Super Moon night. I mostly missed them all - remembering at the end of the day, and too lazy to do anything about any of them. But today is the first day of spring, and that certainly calls for a celebration, particularly since I noticed it in the morning.

I finally finished this block from the Jane Stickle quilt. It took me several days, since I did not work on it continuously. I used the leftover fabric from my Block of the Month. The center cross seemed like it would be easy, and it is, except the part about lining up the two triangles so that it actually forms a cross. This is after three tries, and I decided it was close enough. And the part about what color goes where. I made the center with a dark background accidentally. Even though it would be fine as an alternate design choice, I really liked the look of the light background better. So I started over and made another center with a light background.

I am pretty proud of the middle area. Instead of cutting those weird pencil shapes, I sewed rectangles, and trimmed them to size. That turned out to be much easier than I expected.

Unfortunately, since I was using leftover pieces, I did not have enough dark fabric to finish the border of the block. I decided an alternate design choice would be to reverse the colors - the dark was supposed to be the bigger part. Wow, I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to finish it with cornerstones because I was a quarter of an inch short of the dark fabric. See those little pieces do count, even to fractions of inches. Luckily, I found another scrap and was able to complete the block. In fact I have an extra inch of fabric for another cornerstone!

With the lighter border, I think the dark background center would have looked pretty good too. With each of the blocks in this quilt, there are so many beautiful variations of the same block.

This block has 23 pieces, so that makes my new total now 67 blocks and 1432 pieces.

10/10/10 Results

I am sure that you are waiting with baited breath to see if I had any finishes that I could mark as 10/10/10.  Yes I did.  Sort of.

I decided to do something do-able instead of stressing out over it.  I decided to do a block for the Jane Stickle book.  Not only would this give me a completion, it would also bring progress to this project that has stalled for a very long time.  Longer than I like to imagine.  Part of the problem has to do with a change in scanners, which is a silly reason indeed.  I realize that the quilt won't have the 10/10/10 date on it, but the spreadsheet will.

When I got out my material, I found that I had already started this block.  Even better!  I found the background fabric I needed, trimmed away unneeded parts of the applique, carefully and properly centered the applique with the freezer paper on top and sewed away.  It wasn't until I took off the freezer paper that I realized that the applique had slid away from the freezer paper, and my block isn't as symmetrical as I wanted.

I could take out the bigger parts and trim and applique them down smaller, but in order to have a 10/10/10 finish, I decided to call this finished and be done with it.  I don't think it looks bad, so it seems more of a design choice than an error.

As always,  I reserve the right to remake any blocks that are bothering me at that time.  But really, I think I will have so many of these hmmm blocks that I won't want to make the effort.

I have also finished all four of the Quilts for Kids quilts!  Yeah!  I need to set the ink on the labels, and wash them before I send them off.  Oh yeah, and take pictures first.