Block Stash, part 2

More block sets I have hanging around - these are obviously a very recent addition, the green scrappy blocks I just made up recently. Hopefully they will get made into a top before long. There are 20, 12" blocks.



These are 16, 6" blocks in Japanese taupes, in a corn and beans pattern.



And these are 9, 8" funky houses, inspired by the block lotto one month last year. I want to use these for a funky baby quilt, but again, have taken a pauseto think about sashing...

Block Stash, part 1

Although I've been de-stashing, getting rid of block and tops I may never use and generally thinning out my quilt related stuff, I still do have a number of sets of blocks hanging about (as one does). Thought I'd share...

I have 17 (can't count) brightly coloured Tic-Tac-Toe blocks. These blocks are Julie's fault. And maybe Sophie's fault, too (not my fault, of course!). See, back a while ago Sophie chose a tic-tac-toe block for the Block Lotto, though that was bright colours on a white background. Then Julie came to London for her annual visit in February (2010, this is) and brought me 3 of these inverse blocks as a gift. So I made enough more for a small quilt top and then - nothing. This is partly because I can't decide if I want to sash the blocks or do a straight set. And partly inertia!



Ok, these blocks are 48 x 9" squares which I made back in (apparently) July 2008. There's really no excuse for not doing anything with them.





These are 36 each of 10" scrappy log cabins in warm and cool colours, respectively. This was an exercise back in March 2010 to emtpy my scrap basket and it made a good dent in it. I haven't yet done anything with the blocks, but it's a step in the right direction.

New cutting mat

the old one is even worse than it looks in the photo. It's got valleys in it, and lots of bits of thread sticking to it... Frankly, it's a wonder I can cut on it at all!



[edited to day - this is actually the better side of the old mat - the other side is even worse and has paint stains on it, too! - and I do change my mats fairly regularly - this new one is at least the 4th or 5th I've owned since I got into quilting and fibre arts on a serious basis...]

Pick a theme, again

These are more ATCs done for a swap where the players chose their own theme - these are all done in fabric & stitch. The top on is a somewhat loose representation of the Church of the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing (Western) Wall in Jerusalem. Her chosen theme was places of worship. This is one of my very favourite cards I have made recently - for some reason the wailing wall popped into my head when I read her theme (no idea why) and this card came out very much like I'd imagined it would look before I started stitching. Which I'm sure you all can sympathise, is not always the case!



This one is for a Folk Art theme...



and this is a hostess card - she wasn't in my group, but in her group, her chosen theme was old fashioned beehives.



And this one was African culture.

Done!

Finished! What more is there to say, really. I was debating what I'd start next, when the question was readily resolved for me, in the form of a Mother's Day present - I'll show that one next time a cross-stitch update is due - one thing I can say is, it sure doesn't feature any snow...

Spot the flower

Four cards for a swap called spot the flower, where a flower had to be included, but in a subtle way, rather than being the focus of the card. I really liked how these came out, especially the background, which is from a page someone gifted me during a trade - really good background text, I think!

Purple strings

These are the strings which are going to end up as purple hearts - haven't started adding the white corners yet. I think I made enough for 16 purple hearts - there were a lot of purple strings in the box. And now, there are fewer:



Though not as few as the green ones, where there were only three left. Still, it's progress. I wish I'd taken a photo of the pile before I started!

And I wish I'd taken a photo of how full my box of strings was, before I started trying to bust my scraps this year (it was overflowing) - progress is definitely being made here...

Purple - I hope!

As many of you may know, I'm following along with the 2011 Rainbow Scrap Challenge (button in sidebar) as I wanted to reduce my scrap stash anyway, and this seemed a fun way to approach it. We started the year with blue, then moved to red in February and green last month. This month, while there has been no official announcement of the colour chosen, the background of the So Scrappy blog has changed to purple (it has matched the colour every month so far), so I'm gonna take a leap of faith and assume purple is the chosen colour. And if not, well, I've still reduced my scraps, right?

I started by weeding out all my purple 5" squares, and combining them with some 2 3/4" squares in tans and pale browns to make no-waste flying geese blocks. I then took these blocks, added a two inch strip down the side (using my purple 4" squares) and then a strip along the bottom (from my purple strip stash), to end up with a block about 5.75" square. The blocks really are all purple and tan, not blue, but you know how hard it is to photograph purples accurately.

Anyway, I have some more to make yet, but when they are finished, they will have made a reasonable dent in the purples - and I will also make some purple string hearts to go along with my blue, red and green ones, of course.

Modern Clover

So, these are my block lotto blocks for April - I did think about posting a blog entry saying something like I'd finished all my UFOs and had no projects I was working on, but decided that while those of you actually reading on the day might get it (April Fools!), it might be confusing later on...

Anyway. Instead, you get my block lotto blocks for April. These blocks are a little more special than normal because this is actually a block I made up myself. A little background to that...

I've been doing the lotto for some time now - years - and am pretty good friends with the Grand Vizier of all things Lotto, Sophie, despite never having actually met her. At one point, when she was having some health problems and moving house, I even helped do the admin for the lotto for a few months (and boy was I glad to be able to hand that back to her - it's a LOT of work, even when everything goes totally smoothly!). Anyway, we frequently talk lotto via email and sometimes she bounces ideas off me or gets my opinion about a certain block or colourway (there are other longtimers who also perform this function...). To be honest, she's usually right in whatever she thinks in the first place - and sometimes, a block which I wasn't sure about actually turns out to be immensely popular and I end up liking it as well! But it's fun to throw ideas back and forth and to be a little in on the process from time to time.

This block came about as part of a discussion about possible flower blocks for the lotto - we were looking at all sorts of things, from the extremely simple to the more complex, and this was something I drafted as an example of a very simple flower block, made from (mostly) half-square triangle units. In the end, Sophie decided to use it for the April block, with a few refinements (like the colour placement - keeping the lighter fabric to the left), which is fun.

I was able to make these blocks entirely from my stash of scrap squares, as well, so that's a nice bonus!

I won the lotto!

Not the money lotto, unfortunately, but almost as good - the Block Lotto. I will be winning 48 blocks from the lotto - though I have elected to keep my own 9 as they were largely made from my scraps and therefore I can't duplicate most of them, so I will only be receiving 39 in the post. which is still quite a few. How fun! Gotta love the lotto...

More themes

Some more cards from the Pick-a-theme swap - this theme was vintage women or girls with wings. Nice theme - might steal it myself in a future swap...



This one was birds with accessories.



And this one, Scotland.

Pick a theme

A couple of ATCs made for a pick-a-theme swap (everyone chooses her or his own theme within a little group) -theme for this one was dragonflies, as you probably guessed...



...and Mardi Grad masks for this one.

Stained Glass...

Well. I added another row to this at the weekend, so now it's 6x6 blocks. I had originally intended it to be 6x7, but actually, I'm thinking now that I like it square. I intend to put a black border all the way around it, and am thinking about another border as well, but not sure if it will make it look too busy - I guess the answer is to get the black border on first and go from there...

Green string hearts

While I made the last block for the green quilt I was working on yesterday (you can just see the edge peeping out from under this stack of green hearts) I also did some string hearts with the rest of my green string stash - I made 12 of them, to go with the 10 blue ones I have. I did have 10 red as well, but donated them to Clare for Quilts for Leukaemia, so I decided I really needed to also make at least a handful of reds - don't have a lot of red strings, though, so perhaps I will do that throughout the year (I did make two, but that was about all my red strings were up to - which is good, really!).

Here's what's left of my stack of green strings now:



yep, just three strips. Not sure you can tell precisely how high it was when I started, but it was certainly a lot higher than three strips!

Green again

Well, I finished all the green blocks today - or rather, I finished the ones I had cut out, which was, apparently, 19 rather than 20 - guess what's on the cards for tomorrow! Still, I think it looks great and hopefully it won't be too annoying trying to get a good mix of greens for the last block - I've used up most of my decent sized scraps (the smaller pieces, I may be able to get from scrap) so it will mean cutting strips from my box of small greens - which isn't a problem, of course, as that's something I wouldn't mind reducing anyway...

ALQS5 - the other quilt

Well, I finally got around to showing the second quilt I received in the ALQS5 swap - this one was made by Peggy, and is a lovely little piece - it's very simple, relying mostly on the textures and colours of the fabrics for its effect, but I like it a lot. It's one of those pieces that is much more effective in person, I think, though you can get a general idea from the photo. I really like the burned edges as well. Very different from the other piece I got, but who wants everything to be the same?

Stickers and more

That was the theme of a swap I took part in a little while back - many swaps ask for one not to use stickers, or at least not to use them as a focus, which I understand, as a sticker stuck on a background is not a very thrilling card. This swap, however, was a chance to use some stickers - I've gone with a sort of Far East Theme. My friend Ruth in South Africa kindly sent me some pages from a book she was deconstructing, which featured old maps of China. I used these as background to the cards, along with some oriental paper, stamps featuring airships of various sorts (Korean and Vietnamese when I had them, but a few others, too), and the Chinese vase stickers. I finished off with some flower stickers. There were 5 cards - four for the swap, and one went back to Ruth as a thank you!

Not far to go...

Nearly done now - I have the rest of the roof and the chimneys, some snow on the trees and a couple of snowflakes and the word winter in the background, plus a narrow border. This one is taking me much longer than something this small would normally take!

Log Cabin Star going travelling

This is a quilt I've had around for a while - the blocks came from a block swap ages ago and were eventually made up into a quilt in May 2008, apparently (according to my handy blog!) - the problem with this quilt is that it's not quite big enough for my bed (it should work in theory, but I tried it for about a week and it just wasn't right) and a little too big to just hang around the house as a throw quilt - it would be fine for a double bed, but mine is larger. As it's never really been used, I've decided it's the perfect quilt to donate to a collection of quilts going off to Japan to help furnish some of those who have lost everything with a new start, in a few months time. Midsomer Quilting in Bath is acting as a collecting centre, liaising with a quilter in Japan. I'm sure there are probably other initiatives as well, but this is one I happen to know about...



Obviously, other things are needed in Japan as well - I'm sure donations of money can be put to great use, especially in the short term - but as I am a quilter, I almost always have several "spare" quilts floating around my house, either because they have been put aside to be presents at some future point or because they were made with no specific purpose in mind and therefore, don't always suit our house - so it makes sense to donate one. I did think about using a quilt as a raffle prize to raise money for Japan on my blog* but in the end decided to simply donate an actual quilt as I think it will be gratefully received and hopefully respected as well. Quilting has a strong tradition in Japan, and while this is nothing like some of the tiny, intricate pieces I've seen made by Japanese quilt artists, it's certainly a quilt I'd be happy to own, even if I hadn't just lost my home...

*I've seen this done before on a blog - someone offered up a quilt as a prize and basically, if you donated money to whatever the cause was, you got chances in the raffle - it works on the honour system - the person auctioning the quilt has to trust that people aren't lying when they say they've donated to the Red Cross or whatever - but we're all trustworthy, aren't we! But in the end, I decided I was too lazy, and just donating a quilt would be a lot less organisational effort.

In these shoes?

For a swap with a shoe theme, I decided to go with collage featuring shoes (what else) and the Kirsty MacColl song "In these Shoes"...