Scrappy Saturday, browns continue

I managed to get 2 more brown scrappy triple four patches made last night.

I've been using my recliner chair as the setting for most of my pictures that only need a small area. It has the Ott light behind it, so I get the most accurate colour representation there. But that's why there has been that burgundy fabric in the background of some of my pictures lately. I have a portable one that I should dig up, and then I wouldn't have to use the chair, I could spread out on the floor, or something. But anyway, this works, for now. With the shorter days, daylight pictures are harder to come by.
I'm hoping to go over to Gail's for a couple of hours sewing this afternoon. I now have Lazy Sunday completely finished, although no picture yet, I'm waiting for the wind to die down so I can get one outside. If not, I'll take it and pin it up on my design wall later this morning. But, with that one done, I am now moving on to Thanksgiving Leaves. I pulled it out of it's box last night, and found that I have 6 blocks done, and a seventh started. I need either 12 or 16, depending on the size I decide to go with. So, that is next in my line up of attempts to finish without starting anything new. This scrappy challenge is a new start, but it barely counts because it's such small amounts each week. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. I'm linking up with Soscrappy. There are more fun brown scrappy things to see there.

On the needles

Wow, two posts in one day! I'm just a writing machine today, on top of being a finishing machine. LOL! I had hopes of showing a new knitting project today that I had started yesterday. However, the tension was all wrong, so I ended up ripping it all out, and ordering the appropriate sized needles. I got a bit confused, since the pattern specified one size needles to get the right size, and the yarn specified another. I made the mistake of going with the pattern recommendation, and ended up with the stitches being way too small. Note to self, when using very expensive alpaca yarn, do a gauge swatch first. However, all this means that I will be finishing Avery's truck sweater instead of starting something new.

I'm almost at the neck and shoulder decrease stage. I simplified the truck considerably, and changed it from a tow truck to a white pick up truck. His daddy has a white pick up truck, so I thought it was a good choice. I'm linking this post up to Judy's On the Needles

Orca Bay is finished

 I have another finish! I'm turning into a lean, mean finishing machine, well, maybe not lean, and certainly not mean. The binding went onto Orca Bay yesterday. It was pouring down rain yesterday, though, so I couldn't get any pictures until this afternoon. I wanted this quilt to be a bit bigger than the original instructions, so I added a couple more borders to it.








                                                                                    There is so much going on in this quilt that I
decided to use a very basic design for the quilting. I've been using this one more often lately, Square Spiral by Keryn Emmersen. I like the way it follows the strong diagonal lines in the piecing. I used one of the diagonal stripe fabric I keep in my stash for doing bindings, and again used a faux piping technique to sew the binding on completely by machine. For some people, doing the final part of stitching the binding by hand is one of their favourite parts of doing the quilt. I'm not of that mind. By the time I get to putting the binding on a quilt, I am usually more than ready to have it done, and don't want to take the additional time to hand stitch it down. There's a short tutorial on how to do this kind of binding here. Unless I have an irregular edge on a quilt, or piecing where the points would end up cut off, this is my go to binding .  I'm linking up to Finish it up Friday and Can I Get a Whoop Whoop in order to celebrate this finish.

Customer Quilts.

 I've had three customer quilts go home this past week. Two for Charlene and one for Amalia.
This first one here is Charlene's. It's a pattern by Edyta Sitar, and is done completely with 1 1/2 inch strip scraps. Charlene never lets anything get away from her.

 I used a very simple Square Spiral pattern by Keryn Emmersen for this quilt. The diagonal lines complement all the horizontal and vertical lines in the piecing, with some gradual curves as well. I love the texture the quilting adds to all the fun fabrics in this piece.

 And, as I said I would try to do more often, here's a glimpse of the back.

 This quilt is Charlene's as well. It's a complete departure from the scrappy one above. This one is calm and toned down, and reminds me of a good cup of coffee. I found a really fun new pattern on the Digitech Designs website called Modern Bricks by Krista Withers. I think it fits the modern design of this quilt perfectly.

 Here's a close up of the front.

 And the back. I off set the pattern by one quarter for each row. I love all the movement in this design.

 This quilt is Amalia's, a string pieced Lemoyne Star. A couple of weeks ago I was reading Vicki's blog post here, and she was talking about doing a quilting design where she could do the border at the same time as the rest of the quilt. A bell went off in my head, and I thought, I have got to try this. And when Amalia's quilt came up, it was a perfect opportunity to try this technique.

 I did continuous curves in the star points and the background squares. While browsing through one of Darlene Epp's resource books, I came across a design she called iron fence. When I saw that one, it was a perfect choice to adapt for this technique, since the point of the border design meets up with the pint of the piecing. My original plan for the quilting did not include the swirl in the background squares, but when I saw the swirl in the border design, it was a natural progression to put one in the background squares.

This one was a lot of fun to do, and I learned something new in the process. Have I mentioned lately, that I love what I do? Thanks ladies.

Design Wall Monday, Nov. 4, 2013

Great Granny is finally finished and off the wall. All her borders are on, and, after I took this picture of her draped over the long arm machine, she went to hang up with the rest of my quilts waiting their turn on the machine.

 So, now I have the Bonnie Hunter mystery that ran in Quiltmaker magazine last summer called Lazy Sunday, up on the wall. But It's only there briefly. I'm going to be working on this as a get it finished project, in my quest to, if not cure my startitis, at least cut down on it a bit. I'm currently working on getting the last 2 of the green triangle borders put together, so they can go on. I really like the yellow border in this. It makes it happy and sunny, just like what a lazy summer Sunday should be.
I'm linking up to Judy's Design Wall Monday.

Stash Report, week 44, 2013 and Scrappy Saturday on Sunday

I've been watching the posts at So Scrappy for a long time. She chooses a colour of the month to concentrate on for using up scraps. I've been wanting to participate for a long time, so I've decided to jump in. There's also been a quilt that I've been wanting to make for a long time, a triple four patch. So, I've decided to combine the 2. I've been doing really well with finishing things lately, and since this will be long term project, it won't take that much time from finishing other things.

So, I'll use these blocks above as the body of the quilt, eight of each month's colour.And then since I'll have little four patch units left over, I'll use these as the border. I played around in EQ7 for a while to get the sizes and the numbers of blocks that I'll need. I have 5 more browns picked out, so I can work on them off and on through the month. And every little bit helps to increase the stash used numbers.
I finally managed to get the Great Granny finished, so there was border fabric cut and used for her, and I worked on Lazy Sunday, but that fabric was already counted, so there wasn't much fabric out this week.

Used this week:                                            1.4 yards
Used this year:                                     120.25 yards
Added this week:                                            0 yards
Added this year:                                     165.55 yards
Balance:                                                   45.3 more yards in than out.
I'm linking up to Judy's Stash report and to Soscrappy Saturday

On my needles, Nov. 1, 2013

 I'm working away at the Truck Sweater for Avery for Christmas. The back is finished and blocked.

 One of the sleeves is finished and blocked.

And the second sleeve will be done by the end of the evening, and then I can cast on and start working on the front. I left the fun part til last. I've been rummaging around in all my drawers of yarn, and have found some that I think will work for the truck. Some of them are a bit of a smaller gauge, so I hope it doesn't cause a problem, but I won't know for sure until I get there. I went looking for other yarns of the same gauge as this yarn, but there weren't any small enough balls in the store, and I really didn't want to be buying a large ball, just to do the colours in the truck, so I'll make do with what I have. I'll know more by this time tomorrow. I'm linking up with Judy's On the Needles.