Closing Down 2022

Well, 2022 is going out with a whimper. I got sick the week before Christmas, barely pulled it together in time to enjoy a few good days with family and then, bam. Relapsed and now, probably bronchitis. Uggh. In my defense, it was super, super cold here for those weeks and I probably overdid things for the holiday.

All finished!

Anyway, real quick post here. These are my last finishes of the year! Moody 9-Patch which was started clear back in November of 2020. You can check out the antique inspiration on that post if you like.

Looking cozy

I worried and worried about how to hand quilt the large sashing pieces, but in the end, did something super simple. You can obviously see it better on the brown tone on tone fabric than on the floral.

Maybe not the best hand quilting?
But it's done, all done....

The entire quilt was machine quilted in-the-ditch between all the blocks and then the hand quilting followed after.

This one has a very rich, warm look to it

It was a great this particular quilt laying across my lap during these cold winter months! I'm thinking it's close enough to the original inspiration to make me feel happy and yet, not so carbon copy as to be boring.

Our adorable granddaughters

Here's a quick pic of a pile of puppies kiddos we found by our tree on Christmas Eve this year! Such a joy to have grandkids. Wouldn't trade it for the world!

Vintage T is a true blue finish!

And here is the very last finish of the year. If I hadn't machine quilted this late in November or early in December {I so forget the details now}, it would have never happened. I got my machine back and wanted to test out the dual feed thingamabob right away. Works perfectly, thank goodness!

A slightly older look

I ended up putting the binding on in little pushes of effort while sitting around being a couch potato. Still am doing that in fact. Just trying to get better every day.

Machine quilting for the win!

This isn't my fave quilt ever, but I'm very pleased with the way I was able to use up some of the oldy moldy orange fabrics languishing in the stash totes. Playing with these colors was hard. The look and feel of the quilt is definitely not as joyful as some others that I have done though the years!

Loving this soft looking finish

The backing was a mishmash of anything that was big enough to throw together and make into the proper size! I haven't had to buy backing now for almost two years with the last two fabric donations from my family. That is coming to a screeching halt though as the found pieces are getting smaller and smaller. 

Calling this one'Revised'

One other thing that I've been very slowly working on {everything has to be couch work these days while I huff and puff and/or cough}, is the #AHIQColor Palette challenge. I'll share more of the inspiration details over at the AHIQ blog some other day. For now, this has been a lifesaver having it mostly prepped and ready for hand stitching. Happy New Years to all!

Moving Things Along

 Trying to get a couple more finishes in before the end of the year. Moody 9-Patch has the initial phase of binding sewn on, all the clips on and now is waiting on the hand stitching time.

Moody 9-Patch getting a binding

It was a huge relief to get Country Stars all finished up and ready for gifting. I even managed to get the label stitched on! 

Country Stars all finished up!

Next up will be making the time to deliver it. Gotta wait on my husbands schedule as we want to do it together. Sort of a 'Merry Christmas' and also a housewarming gift. 

The compass stars are never a bad idea

It's kind of funny how it ended up with a vaguely holiday vibe, which was never intended at all. I just hope our friend likes traditional look quilts as much as she proclaimed to. Kind of a trip down memory lane for me and though I don't LOVE this quilt, I'm happy with the way it turned out.

So happy the hand quilting grid proved out

The applique could have been a little bit more exciting, but then it would have been difficult to give away. Right?

Should be a good couch throw!

Next up in the hoop is the #AHIQStringTulipsQal project. This is the top that I thought was done and then  months later, had to pull it back out of the quilt top drawers and add on an applique border. So much better looking now. I thought surely, surely I would want to hand quilt the one and only Christmas quilt top left in the drawers, but nope. Absolutely no interest at the moment. For some reason this one thinks it needs to be next.

On to the next quilt

Oh well. It should be very easy to jump into and get started. I went ahead and machine stitched in-the-ditch around the large center area and also, at the outside border. Not necessary, but something that will make the overall stitching move just a little faster. And it won't ruin the look of the hand quilting one iota. Win, win.

Ready for the next step

All the applique for the thirty Primrose Path applique blocks is done now. The little flower centers went lickety-split. Now I will be adding little corner triangles to the blocks. Just need to decide on the right color for that. Originally I thought to do a white texty fabric, then I moved on to a mixed palette of pastels. Now I'm leaning hard toward shades of the med-pink used in a couple of the blocks. I never intended for this to end up a 'pink and black' quilt, but hey, what do I know?

A quilt that refuses to be taken seriously

You can see that I've sewn together eight of the nine blocks necessary for making the 25-Patch Hst quilt. Of course it doesn't seem like nearly enough {color me shocked} and so I will be changing it to a sixteen block quilt. I started out following the original quilt look for block colors but eventually just sort of gravitated toward changing things up here or there. Now I'm in good shape to make up the next eight blocks willy-nilly and then afterward I'll probably have to mix all the blocks up to make everything make sense once again. 

I'm crossing my fingers this will be a joyful, happy looking quilt, not a sad hst vomit type thing. I went ahead and cut out more of the darker brown and medium blue fabrics for more units. So far the green is the very hardest to introduce into the quilt which is pretty on par for normal around here. Don't want to leave it out though as there will be more green used in the sashing pieces. Probably. It's been a lot of fun though and coming together without much trouble. In my head, I'm calling it a 'palette cleanser', but I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's a quilt that refuses to be treated as precious?

A Little Quilting and A Lotta Family

Would you be shocked if I said that life had been busy lately? What was it that I read the other day, something about our 'hustle culture' being the new norm? Yeah. Not by choice for most of us. I managed to squeeze in a few good minutes trimming off the points of the hsts and then throwing a few of them up on the wall. This isn't sewn together yet, still in full-on contemplation mode.

25-Patch Hsts

All those hsts sewn together properly would represent four blocks to the 25-Patch HST quilt. The look is overtly {almost obnoxiously} scrappy, yet somewhat vintage in look and feel. Most all of the fabrics used are in a 15 year range though. There is probably only one fabric that would truly be of vintage era though. I'm absolutely loving the mishmash of colors and sheer unpretentious quality that's already shining through. The Inspiration quilt has nine of these 25-patch blocks so I'll start with that, roughly following the original makers lead as to value. After those nine blocks are sewn, then we'll figure out the rest of the quilt. Pretty sure there will be lots of leftover units to play with.

Primrose Path blocks

I seem to be in this rut lately of making myself finish up one applique project at a time. So weird. For years, when I got bogged down mentally, then I just pushed the project off to the back burner and started stitching on another. Now I'm acting like Sally Steadfast and keeping my nose to the grindstone until it's ALL done. 

Figuring out the centers
Can you see the snow piled up outside on the deck?

It was really exciting to finally figure out the little centers of the primrose flowers. I knew the fabric needed to be a in similar tones of faded black, but the fussy cut flowers in the this black fabric is exactly right. Don't you love when that happens?

Moody 9-Patch in the hoop

Still hand quilting on the Moody 9-Patch quilt. It's only been a finished quilt top since February of 2021, but it seems like it's been in the quilt top drawers for much, much longer. I machine stitched-in-the-ditch between all the blocks before my sewing machine was fixed. Basically, the dual feed wasn't working properly which makes for all those stitching lines being less than fully in-the-ditch and more of a meandering trail of thread. Even with using a standard walking foot. Oh well. Made me a little mad at the time, but now I don't even hardly notice. Or care. Am sort of laughing at myself for expending so much energy doing hand quilting on a quilt that barely shows off the effort involved though. It's been lovely having it in my lap though! Such a pretty, deep fall look and feel going on here!

All the Wilson Siblings in one place and 
lightning didn't strike...

The entire family didn't end up being altogether on the big day after all, only about 45 persons or so. But by Saturday, all of my siblings were present at my mom and dads for 'pizza night'. It's become part of the holiday weekend to have one pizza night, an Asian food night and also a taco bar in the days following Thanksgiving. Anyway, on impulse because its so rare we're all together in one place, we found ourselves taking a few family photos of the siblings. Some smart-alecky person suggested we arrange ourselves in order by birth, and of course people started snapping pics for posterity. It was pretty funny getting it all sorted out and then later on somebody mentioned that half of us pictured here are Gen X kids and the other half are millennials, Whatever that means? 21 years between oldest and youngest in case you were wondering. My baby brother was only four months old at my wedding! lol

I don't really talk about this much because we got a lot of flack about it growing up. People have SO MUCH to say about people having more than four or five kids in their families. I always had to laugh when someone would say my four kids was a big family. Right.... You wouldn't believe all the things total strangers and/or supposed friends would say right in front of us kids or my parents too. And not expect anyone to get offended. It was crazy and really rude at times! You learn really quick who the real friends are! Once in a great while someone would have wonderful things to say to us and we'd all sort of relax and lose the defensive posture. Not that we care now, but as kiddos, it was terribly hard to take at times.

Mom and dad had 12 kids in all with 11 kids raised to adulthood. Let me just say that they were incredible parents to us all and never lived off of anyone or expected anyone else to pick up the slack. Two of my siblings {right smack in the middle and pretty much the bridge between 'older' and 'younger' families} have passed now and this is what is left of the tribe. We still feel their loss every time we do something like this but know it will only get worse as the years fly by. And the numbers undoubtedly shrink even more? Such is life unfortunately so we cherish the good times while we can.

I am the shorty, second to the left in this picture. Fun times and yes, I was bossy growing up. What can I say? As you can see, a few 'what are we doing here?' looks because of the relaxed attire, but who really cares in the long run? I actually think the pictures turned out better from not being overly scheduled and planned to the nth degree! We don't always get along super, magically, wonderfully well, but I know if ever I truly needed anything, I could call any one of them and they'd run to my aid in a heartbeat. You know how it is with well adjusted siblings, blood is thicker than water, but ooh... we also have memories like elephants! I had a great time telling one of my nieces this last weekend about a much younger version of her sweet mama.*wink

Wintertime in Brewster, Washington

In other news, we've had snow and then a little bit more snow on top of that. The first two pictures were snapped by my husband a couple days ago. The first one was taken at his current construction/remodeling project approx. six miles from where we live {which is a whole lot closer to that mountain in the background}. It was such a cold, clear day, the distance looks much, much shorter than what it really is!

 

This next picture was taken just as he was driving through the outskirts of our little town of Pateros {less than half a mile from where we live}, but looking off to the left across the Columbia River instead of straight ahead at Billygoat mountain {seen in the previous picture}.

The sun is shining in Pateros, Washington

This last picture was taken by a friend of ours here in town who owns a little Airbnb. She snapped this picture while taking a walk along the Methow river, right where it dumps into the Columbia river {pictured behind the railroad bridge and also in the background of the previous picture. This is where our little town of Pateros sits, right at the junction of those rivers and nestled in the foothills of the mountain shown in the first picture. We really do have gorgeous views year around here, but in wintertime, after a fresh snowfall and  then the sun comes out? It's just incredible. So pretty.

Love the steamy look to the rivers in the wintertime

And mostly we do love the winters here, but wowsers, it did come early this year! I have shoveled snow off and on in short little spurts for about three days now. Yesterday I slipped and fell splat! on my left shoulder, elbow and hip, thankfully only getting slightly bruised. Normally my husband would do more of the shoveling, but we all got hit by a stomach bug on the Monday after the big weekend and I'm the one who recovered the fastest it seems. I'm just way too impatient to wait around for him to do the work, even though my back and shoulders are crying out the entire time I'm shoveling. I am soooo out of shape! There is a huge difference between a needle and a snow shovel, but I hate having snow fall into my boots every time I head out to the garage, the dumpster or to the car. Ughh. Don't tell them, but I always miss my boys a little extra this time of year...

I Think This is Called Momentum

I have a rather large list of opened ended UFO's at the moment. Imagine me wincing right now! It's definitely more than is normally allowed to happen around here, even with the typical do-what-feels-good-in-the-quilting-room attitude that generally reigns supreme here at Quilty Folk.

Moody 9-Patch is a completed quilt top!

As usual though, my brain keeps coming up with ever more interesting ideas to try. Yep, there are unquestionably gonna be new and improved quilts in my future! In this vein, I decided to dedicate myself to at least one more 'finish' here in the short term. Once a project is dumped onto the completed quilt top list, then the burgeoning sense of overwhelm seems to drastically reduce. People ask how I can have so many open ended projects going on, but the wholly, 100% finished quilt tops just don't have the same effect. All the major decision making struggle and angst is done and over with at that point! Right now, at least part of the problem with the too-long UFO list is this: I have a couple quilt tops that unexpectedly jumped OUT of the drawers and demanded more work done on them. So not playing fair! 

Loving the effect of the floral

In the spirit of crossing things off the list, the 9-patch seemed like an easy target. Like I've stated before, it was started in November of last year and then essentially forgotten about. In my memory, it was started in a rare moment of basically looking around the quilt room and wanting/needing to start something new. Now, sometimes {rarely} I'll go totally off the rails and just dive into something super spur of the moment and not very well thought out. Most times though when this particular feeling overtakes me, I look to the stacks of marinating fabric sitting around the quilt room. 

This is where I've spent countless hours pondering all kinds of fabulous to-me options. This is dream time. These fabrics have been pulled out numerous times in a period of months and years. Stacked and restacked. Fabrics and colors tossed or perhaps newly introduced? Ideas, patterns and design concepts distilled into an important nugget or two. What story does this specific blend of fabric want to tell?

Kind of a rich look to this one!

Like so many other projects started around here, Moody 9-patch ended up being an interpretation of an antique quilt. That probably sounds relatively simple. It can be, but this time it most certainly wasn't. I have played with this pile of fabric many, many times in the past couple years and just couldn't wrap my mind around which fabric should go where. I considered several different other design ideas too. No dice. No matter what direction my musings may have taken me on any particular day {and you can bet a few were vastly different than this oh-so-simple setting}, I would always come back this basic 9-patch with large sashing units. Apparently, that part HAD to be!

Simple but sweet

Most probably, it was the floral fabric holding me back. Though I love and adore them, {why else would I buy them?}, florals often times throw my brain into a tizzy of doubt and confusion. And I positively dread cutting into them. How do you successfully cut up and incorporate a strong floral into a quilt design without it completely overpowering everything? Or cutting it into without ruining the floral gorgeousness. Is it even going to look good cut into little squares etc.? And then, what if the floral turns out to be a huge mistake {the quilt wants a geometric print instead?}. You won't KNOW until the quilt top is near completion. What a disaster that would turn out to be! Ah, well. Eventually it's time to do something even if it turns out to be wrong. Gotta love those days of longing to start something new. They oftentimes turn out to be wonderful permission to plunge right into the thoughtfully, oh-so-carefully charted path of 'unknowns'!

Does this moody looking quilt top make you smile too? I'm sure you were wondering why I didn't just toss the floral fabric and do something easier. Well....., would I be sitting here smiling if it was just any old boring fabric used instead of that fantabulous print? Part of the thrill is meeting and conquering the challenge, whatever it may be. When intuition and instinct is telling us something needs to be done a certain, specific way, then it's our job to go the extra mile to make sure that it happens. We're not going to be happy with the end result if we know within ourselves that we've cut corners on what could have been.

Gonna be fun to hand quilt this one some day!

When cutting the floral strips, there ended up being a couple strips where the floral design aligned along the edge instead of being centered. Not having enough fabric to properly fussy cut, I determined to use these specific units along the outside edges of the quilt. Problem solved!

Overall, it was a great play with color, really stretching me. The floral fabric is actually a very deep, brownish purple fabric at base, but I didn't want a purple quilt, which is what I figured I'd get if I went too 'matchy-matchy'. Luckily I had enough yardage with four or five different fabrics to create the blue 'background' effect, something I hoped would accentuate the floral and kind of show it off. They tied in well with the blue flowers in the floral without being an exact color match. I like that. Too much perfection bores me to tears! 

One blue fabric was almost too dull to use, but I basically just held my nose and started cutting. Even after I dug through the stash totes, it was so much better than anything else, I felt like there was no other choice. It's amazing and wonderful how forgiving color/tones can be when you go 'scrappy'! 

In the case of the cornerstone squares, I deliberately used the lighter, but obviously more drab looking purples. Wowsers have these fabrics been difficult to find a good home for through the years! Those areas needed to be an obvious contrast without competing in any way with the floral, but still tie back in and transition well with the dark brown. The more 'brownish' of those drab purples tended to go to the outside edges of the quilt so as to not deliberately bring down the sparkle in the quilt. 

The horizontal sashing was actually harder to decide on because I absolutely didn't have what seemed like a best option. Not that I knew for sure what that might be! And so I dithered and dithered until finally going with that very dark brown fabric. It's almost purple, it's so deeply brown. Truly, I thought that particular area of the sashing needed to be a medium tone but Meh! What do I know? lol  Make the call and just move on is generally how I roll these days. Seriously, what would be the point of trying to use up these languishing stash prints and then run to the quilt store for a flawless fabric match in yet another area of the quilt? I'm not saying I'll never, ever do that, but I'm generally gonna try everything else possible first!

4 Blocks on the wall

Another project that I'm trying to work on a little every day or so is these tulips blocks. Which didn't start with these applique blocks, but rather the abandoned bits from another tulip quilt! Of course. Are you surprised? So many of my projects start with little seeds from another quilt and then spill into each other willy nilly until I end up with a series of ideas! 

Auditioning the hourglass units

So... the little hourglass units were the actual 'start' of the previous tulip quilt, an AHIQ prompt and now this one too. Somehow I had cut them out the wrong size and rather than fixing them or starting new, I promptly ditched the idea altogether and went in a totally different direction. Which was fine except for the fact of  all these little hourglass units wasting away!

Looking better with more blocks

Uh huh. Can't have that. And why not have another tulip quilt? It's been very, very tedious sewing up all these hourglass units and I can only handle so much before moving on to another project. Finally I'm at the point where all 196 units are sewn together, points trimmed off and ready to go. Honestly, I've worked on them off and on for weeks!

Do I even need more blocks?

Just need these tulip blocks finished up and it'll be on to the sewing up rows phase. At first, I wasn't at all sure about the leaves. My parents are both gardeners, as are a couple siblings and even my daughter. Tulip quilts have these wide, flowy leaves that never ever show up in quilts for some reason. For this particular quilt I wanted to at least make a nod to the reality of nature! Four blocks in made me frown, then six blocks in I was cocking my head over to the side saying 'maybe' and now at nine blocks on the wall, I'm finally sold on the idea.*whew!  Okay. This will do. Onward ho! And I'm also settling in to the idea of having the hourglass units join together with the brown square in the middle. Things are progressing. What more can we ask for?

Getting Projects Prepped and Ready to Go

 I've been trying to get some of the endless applique projects prepped. The list is a little overwhelming at the moment and I know from experience it helps a lot to have things ready to go. Plus, hand work is seriously calling my name of late. So soothing when the mood is right!

Ormes Inspired getting a word added on

First up was to finally settle on a word to add to Ormes Inspired. I've know for awhile that something needed to be done about that bottom left corner, but nothing ever seemed right. Last week I took a seam ripper and just removed it completely from the quilt top. The word 'Inspired' is what I ended up with, though honestly, I don't feel especially inspired right at the moment.

AHIQhourglass Tulip blocks

Then I decided to get the third? round of tulips blocks prepped and ready to go. These are the blocks that I've been positively itching to get started on and have been making myself do other things in that 'carrot and stick' sort of thing that I do to get through the tedious stuff! I'm not 100% sure about the raspberry pink backgrounds, but I do get tired of cream and bland backgrounds. Nice to shake it up occasionally!

Big Kiss needs a border

These borders should be a very quick wrap up for the Big Kiss quilt. Totally unnecessary as the quilt top is already plenty large enough to finish as a lap quilt. However.... the quilt top just hasn't felt like a 'me' quilt and quite frankly, it looks boring as is. While I didn't want to spend a lot of time on the applique work, it needed something fun looking. I especially love the little pointy top on the pomegranate-look flower. When I free cut that part out during auditioning time, I almost jumped for joy! Yes! It's totally the little things that make us fall in love with our quilts. Why do we ever forget that?

More progress on Melon Patch Rows

All the melon petals have been sewn onto the pink chain rows and are now ready to be further stitched down to the dark red background lengths. This project is taking FOREVER and I'm not at all sure it will even be worth the effort. Still trying to come up with a brilliant idea for the every-other rows of whatever block that seems appropriate. I've mostly settled on an x shaped block, but we'll see. This could end up being an incredibly boring looking quilt too!

Moody 9-Patch quilt blocks

Then there's these very simple 9-patch blocks taking shape on the wall. I had completely forgotten that the parts and pieces were cut out back in November. Too much water under the bridge since then and for some reason I failed to add this new quilt start to my list of ufo's. Which really wouldn't have mattered too much because that list has been ignored much more than looked at lately! Sometimes when there is an excess of hand work, it just feels good to grab something and chain piece. Funny how forward progress happens so much faster with a sewing machine! 

In other happenings, I've been washing up another batch of fabric given to me of late. One of my aunts is moving to another state and wanted to know if I'd like to have the bulk of her fabric? She didn't have a lot, but the trouble is, it all smells heavily of moth balls. Ughh... After trying for most on one day and about to give up on ever eradicating the smell, I finally stumbled upon the answer. Have any of you ever attempted to wash the smell of moth balls out of fabric? The smell is so pervasive, it's almost impossible.

What eventually worked was to soak the fabric in med. sized totes with approx. 1/3 to 1/5 parts white or apple vinegar {both worked fine though I've heard apple vinegar can stain fabric?} to water for 20-24 hours. Then I washed the fabric in the washer with a cup of cleaning strength vinegar. After that I washed the fabric with 1 cup of bleach. Uh huh, really. Then after that I washed it again with about 1/4 cup of bleach and a very small amount of some lightly scented detergent. At that point there is still a faint whiff of moth balls, but after running it through the dryer, out comes wonderfully fresh smelling laundry. Am I crazy?

Okay, so why bother? What a risk! It's not like I need the fabric and we all know what bleach does to color. Mostly I wanted to be able to honestly say to my older aunt that I am using and appreciating some of her fabric. Though I did dump the lower quality and decor style fabrics, it's good to be on the list of give-Audrey-all-the-fabric-you-don't-want-anymore. Right?  Also, it became quite a challenge. And... I got some free quilt backing fabrics out of the deal. Very interesting to see how bleach can massively change the colors in a piece of fabric OR barely change it at all. What made it easy to take the risk of possibly ruining any and all the fabric, was that it was already a lost cause due to the odor issue. My family was laughing at me. Apparently I will do almost anything for free fabric!