Quilt Reveal: Scrappy Cat Collage Mini Quilt

 I am continuing to make progress on each of my quilts fifteen minutes a day. It is a lot of fun to pull out the old projects and make some progress on them, but it is hard to put them away when the fifteen minutes is over. I've been really good about staying organized and putting the projects back to make room for the next projects. I think they will be easier to bring them back out again in 2024 to get them finished off.

Here's a quilt I finished.

This quilt was started in September 2019. I wanted to make another fabric collage quilt, so I collaged a bunch of little strips of fabric on some fusible. There is a link here with a mini tutorial.  I cut out some animal shapes and even eventually finished a camel and a giraffe quilt out of this one sheet of fused fabric.

This month, I am bringing out each of my old works in process and I quilted the scrappy cat  as one of the projects on my Youtube channel, Quilt and Color. 

I only did the quilting on the video, but since I was so close to the finish, I added the words and the binding after the video was over. This quilt wasn't on my list of quilts in progress because it was a scrap from the camel quilt, and not technically its own project, but I am counting it anyway. Like I did last time for the giraffe, I will add it with the start date of the camel quilt and the current end date.

 Circle Block 280

 

On another day, I worked on the Quilty 365 quilt. Since I have been showing closeups on this blog, I wanted to make sure I included them here. This one uses the background fabric from the Portraits quilt. The red is from Boundless, the blues are from Seaglass rooftops, the blue on the right and the orange are from Rey and the Death Star.

 Circle Block 281

  

This one uses the red and blue from Rey and the Death Star, the blue from Seaglass Rooftops and the green is from the Olympics quilt.

Circle Block 282

This one uses the green from Olympics, the background snake fabric is from the Portraits quilt, the light green is from the backing of Zou the Elephant.

 Circle Block 283

The red fabric is from the binding of Boundless quilt

 

Circles 79 - 87

Here's another batch of circles for the Quilty 365 Circle project. Mine is currently named The Rule Breaking Quilt.

 Circle 79

I already showed you Circle 78 which is on the left. It uses leftovers from the Adrinka quilt.
Circle 79 is on the right. An apple is not quite round, but I thought it was close enough. It was a scrap of fabric I picked up to trim and decided to turn into a circle instead.

 Circle 80

 I used a pieced background because I wanted something different that didn't look I made these batches at a time.  I was piecing it as a leader and ender while quilting the leftover rails quilt, which meant that this one finished before the other ones that were being prepped. I think I am going to choose the arrangement in the quilt for this batch, but I have to number them to show you.

Circle 81

PBS (Create TV) had a six hour marathon where they showed quilting shows. My allergies were really bad, so I couldn't do much work but it did give me a good excuse to watch all of them.

I'm pretty sure that all the shows were reruns but since I don't get up at 6am to watch tv, I had only seen a couple of them which had aired at more reasonable times.  It was nice to put faces and personalities to some of the names I had seen on the internet.

One of the techniques they presented on Quilting Arts was layering the fabrics, sewing circles, and cutting the layers.  Then using machine embroidery to embellish.

 Here is me butchering this technique. I put the layers in an incorrect order(I think the background goes in the back  not the front)  and cut the black line way too skinny so it is hard to see, but I like the way it looks here.

 Circle 82

The reason my dining table is not rid of scraps that need to be trimmed for scrap vortex is that I keep bringing more downstairs.  This is one I brought downstairs. I want to keep making plain circles because that is absolutely allowed and I don't want people to forget that. I like that this one is dark and sedate. I used embroidery stitches around it which you can't see very well in the picture, but it will be a nice reward for people who bother to take the time to look at the individual circles.

 Circle 83

 Another do, using a small scrap from the railfence quilt.  This one makes me hungry for All Sorts candy.

 Circle 84

One of the scraps I brought downstairs was a bag of leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell quilt. (That quilt is sandwiched and holding my safety pins for ransom.)  The scraps are very tiny, and only some of them have fusible on the back of them.  I had the fusible out anyway as I am tracing the blocks for the 1857 quilt, so it was an easy decision to make these.

 Circle 85

This one uses leftovers of a circle block which uses leftovers from the rail fence leftovers which uses leftovers of the rail fence quilt. These pieces already had fusible on them so it was a simple matter of arranging them and sewing them down.

 Circle 86

These are more leftovers from the Daisies Do Tell.  I wanted to make a circle out of shapes that were not circular.

Circle 87

The glasses were supposed to be the circular part, but they didn't turn out as circular as I wanted, and the background fabric wasn't flat enough to use so I cut it out and appliqued it on a new background. This one one represents my new pair of glasses, although they don't look like that.

I have also quilted circles on my leftover rail fence quilt.  I used a green washable marker to draw the circles and am hoping that it washes out.  Poor Zeus was so confused when I brought out different sizes of  plates but no food!  Yesterday with my allergies, I chose a sedate green for the binding, but today I cut out a bright orange. I want to hurry and bind it so I can get it washed before the marker becomes permanent.

Linked to:
Move it Forward Monday 
Linky Tuesday

Crankiness

In my last post, I asked my readers to read a variety of books in order to get perspective and form your own reasoned opinion.  This book is one I would recommend to get a different perspective .A World Without Islam by Graham Fuller shows the history of the religions, and shows how some of the things that are attributed to Islam may not necessarily be accurate. It shows how the current war against terrorism really should not be a war against Islam. I haven't read very much of this book yet, because I am not a fan of politics or religious debate, and need some time to recover from the last book.  I got it from the library, so I don't need to review it.

*****************************

All right, enough religion and politics.  In quilting news, I have sewn on the binding to my simply squares quilt, and need to hand stitch it down.  I have also made a list of the next few Jane blocks I want to make.  When I first started, I worked on a few at a time, assembly style, making sure they all used a different fabric.  By doing them assembly style, each of the steps in the process - the cutting, sewing, pressing, logging onto spreadsheet, scanning - was much more efficient, and it made it easier to do several blocks at a time in one "project" instead of making each block its own project.

I haven't focused a lot on quilting.  Taking care of the dog, dealing with books that need to be reviewed, and doing general cleaning (shedding!) inside and outside is taking up my non-working time.


I bought some lawn furniture online, on sale and with a coupon, and the next day it was substantially cheaper at the same store.  I called the company which purports to have a price guarantee, and a no hassle return guarantee.  They said that since my new coupon is only for this week, they could not simply give me the price difference.  I would have to return the first order and rebuy the product.  I thought they could do that without them actually physically having to ship me a whole new package, but they (the representative and his supervisor) said they could not. They would have to ship me a whole new package.  Shipping is free, so they have to pay for additional shipping, and I have to return a 60 pound box to the store. This is a lose-lose proposition.  I explained to him that I am unwilling to carry 60 pounds, depending on whether it comes in one box or several, so I may have to open the box, and return the parts and pieces separately. He was fine with that.  Since the price difference is substantial, I decided to go ahead and process the order as they recommended.  When the UPS man came, he brought one big box.  I asked him to put it directly in my car, but it doesn't fit.

I was in a cranky mood the next day, and thought I should work from home and stay away from people.  I had two telemarketing people come to the door(one came twice), and one by phone,  and a relative came to inform me that she has involved me in a fight she was having with another relative.  I think I must have some magnet that radiates negative energy towards me. At least that day it was in full force.

I am fine now.  I have assembled the ottomans and the table of the lawn furniture and one of the two chairs, and I am happy with the set. I think I can get someone with a larger vehicle to help me take the other box back to the store.  The weather is getting better, and the house and the yard are slowly looking nicer. 

Crazy Orange

Bear Picnic wanted to see a closeup of the quilt I had on the door. I'm happy to show you. It is no longer on the door, but it is on the wall in the bathroom. One day I am going to make a quilt for the kitchen too. My goal is to have at least one quilt in every room and hallway! The background is pieced in alternating colors.




The circles are appliqued on, and I did a chain stitch using crochet thread around each of the circles, thinking I might be able to make the circles look rounder. I wasn't successful in that attempt, and don't think the embellishment actually added anything, but since it didn't take anything away, I'm not taking it out. It has the lovely checkerboard border that I always like. Overall, it isn't my favorite work, but I do like it and it was fun to make.



Just to show that I wasn't showing this to get away from showing quilting progress, I made three crazy blocks over the New Year holiday. There were lots of hard decisions to make. I started out with the simple oranges that came as a kit, the same ones I used for the pumpkins - but they looked too similar to me. The inspiration quilt was mostly orange with some yellow highlights. I added other oranges to make it more interesting, which includes fabrics that I am told are African. It's the fabric that has black and green in it. Both of the pieces I used are different parts of the same fabric. The other African fabric is the orange with the shiny gold in it. I used a very small piece in this block so you'll have to look at the closeup if you want to see it. I got some from a quilt show, and have been trying to think of good uses for them. I also added shiny metallic fabric, and a velvety one. The yellow fabric with the flowers is an old dress of my mother's. That dress or fabric was actually purchased in Africa. I also added black as an accent - I hope I don't regret that. Since I wasn't using scraps, I had to decide what size and shape to cut each fabric. I'm having fun with it.

A Year in Review

I'm not making any goals for the New Year, because I'm not done with the ones for 2008. I'm sure you have been wondering what I've been up to this year, and were hoping I'd give you a recap so you don't have to slog through old blog posts. I'd be happy to oblige.

It's been a good year for me overall. There was some drama this summer with relatives which caused me to start a new blog, and now we aren't talking to each other anymore, but since we didn't talk before anyway, the repercussions are bearable. I'm happy we are finally getting a new president. The big issue that is worrying me now is the economy, but I'm young and healthy enough to work and have job(s), so we will be able to ride it out.

The photos that follow are the finished projects, as they appeared on my blog. A lot of my posts are about the Shakespeare in the Park which won't show up in the finished category.















So what's next? I'm going to quilt today and tomorrow, to properly bring in the New Year. I'll be working on the orange crazy quilt. It's been calling me the loudest lately.

Have a Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2009!