Sandwich Ready

(affiliate links to my fabric designs)

My 2021 goal of one WIP finish each month carries an additional speed bump this month. I need to finish a quilt for my neighbor's first baby by the end of March, too.

I'd planned to use a Spoonflower panel I designed because my neighbors and I have shared gardening love and seeds ever since they moved in a little more than a year ago. The panel comes from a photo I snapped of a butterfly on my delphinium. I've shared delphinium seeds with my neighbors. And we have enjoyed watching butterflies and hummingbirds feasting on the nectar of my flowers.

The panel wasn't quite big enough, so I added borders of scraps from my stash. I had no idea what to do for the back but stumbled upon a solid pastel layer cake I'd bought on sale specifically to make a baby quilt for my niece's first child about six years ago. I'd planned to free motion quilt free-hand baby dinosaurs in each block, but chickened out because my FMQ skills were so weak.

Putting together the back for this quilt made me wish I could find another layer cake just like this one so I could try my hand at the dinosaurs on my domestic machine. Maybe one day I will have to make my own pastel layer cake from the solids in my stash. For now, I'm thrilled to be ready to quilt another two-sided creation, and I'm so happy I was able to use what I have instead of buying anything new.

Linking up with Alycia Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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Snowcatcher Mountains

I neglected to take a "before" photo, so I can't really show in detail why I built a mountain range, but I built my very own mountain range with our leftover flagstone!

The builders did not amend the soil in our neighborhood before building homes. The homes are built on clay. The front and back yards of each home (unless homeowners have amended) are clay. We have replaced about 18 inches of the clay in our front yard, and last year I terraced the steepest part of our backyard and coated it with dirt, landscape fabric, rocks and/or sand to prevent our basement from flooding. Mission so far accomplished!!! We have experienced no window well leaks since the dirt for the terraces was placed!

The back of the house had about a one-foot overhang, which my father-in-law said is often done to add square footage to (and thereby raise the price of) a home. That little overhang made a great hideout for snakes and skunks and other undesirable backyard pets. My neighbors helped me fill that overhang as best we could last fall with rocks. No critters can live in there anymore.

The porch on the front of the house has been slowly separating from the ground ever since we moved here. One evening, our neighbors informed us they saw something make a mad dash into that dark gap. They couldn't tell what it was, and it may have been just a bunny, but it put us on alert that we needed to act once again.

Many of our neighbors have dealt with this problem (the porch separating from the ground) by adding a wall of bricks, either curved or rectangular, around the front section of their porches, then filling the wall-to-porch opening with soil and flowers or xeriscaping. I thinned out my irises last year and shared them with neighbors who built such garden "boxes."

Some neighbors have piled rocks across their openings. A few are like us and haven't fixed the problem yet.

I had a bit of flagstone left over from my backyard project, which actually isn't done yet, but I can't do too much more on it until the rock shop opens on weekends again or until winter is mostly over. I decided the odd shapes of the remaining flagstone would make a great mountain range across our porch gap.

One day, we will have the driveway, steps and porch re-poured or stabilized because they need it. There are many home repairs awaiting our attention. They will happen as we can finish them. For now, I'm so tickled red rock with my newest artwork!

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Charming Painterly Petals

March is just around the corner, quite literally, so it was time to get serious about finishing another quilt if I want to achieve my goal of one WIP finish each month this year.

Because the two Painterly Petals charm packs and the Royal Blue Cotton Supreme yardage that went into the front of the quilt were not my favorite fabrics, I decided one of the Moda Gradients II I'd bought in a five-yard bundle because I loved the other four would be the perfect "time out" panel backing for this quilt. When I pulled out Parfait to look at it, it actually looked, to me, as if it was made to go on the back of this quilt.

The yard of Parfait flowers wasn't quite big enough to fill the entire backing, so I sliced some five-inch strips from the Painterly Petals yardage I'd bought specifically for the backing and the Cotton Supreme Royal Blue remnants, then sewed the strips together on both sides to then slice into exactly enough HSTs to go all the way around the panel, with two leftover blocks, which I might try later to incorporate into a pillow to go with the quilt.

I did not measure the panel before I began making the HSTs. I thought if the panel was an inch or two too big in either direction, I could simply slice off enough to make the HSTs fit. I didn't have to slice. They fit so perfectly, I was stunned! That NEVER happens to me!!!

The back still wasn't big enough, so this time I measured, then cut six 2.5-inch strips from the remaining Cotton Supreme Royal Blue... because that's all I could get out of it! All that remained when I got done was one mostly 2-inch strip. I thought I could piece it into more 2.5-inch strips if I ran out. Fortunately, I did not.

After adding the 2.5-inch borders, I had roughly 35 inches of a 2.5-inch strip of the Royal Blue left. I thought I could craft that and the mostly 2-inch strip into two more blocks to later add to the future leftovers pillow.

I didn't have much steadiness of hand with the longarm for the first half of the quilt, but in my opinion, I got better as I went. I freehanded curves into the Royal Blue triangles with blue thread on top and white on the backing. I free-motion quilted the outer round of HSTs and the borders with my little domestic machine with blue thread on both the top and the bottom. All quilting was finished in one weekend day.

Before I even though about what I would use for the backing, I had thought I would use rainbow leftovers from my Hoffman Spectrum wall quilt binding. After I finished the back, I decided the rainbow of batik leftovers wouldn't look as good with the back of the quilt as they would with the front of the quilt. I had exactly enough of the Painterly Petals yardage left to cut six strips for binding. Once again, I didn't measure, but I didn't think it would be long enough. I pieced the binding, then made random cuts and spliced in some Royal Blue diamonds, then went to work on binding the quilt.

Upon completion, I had one Royal Blue diamond and one Royal Blue remnant left. The amount of extra binding I had to cut off was exactly the same size diamond!!! This quilt literally was a mathematical miracle for me because I'm not that good at math at all, and everything worked so smoothly! Plus, almost all the (mostly) ugly fabric is gone!!!

We snapped a few photos of the quilt in front of some gorgeous red rock we had not been able to visit since... so long ago I can't even remember. Suffice it to say, Lizard had not communed with sandstone in at least 15 months, and probably longer than that. So he was in heaven. Snowflakes began dotting us as we returned to the car, and we're supposed to have around eight inches of heavy, wet snow by this morning! That put me in absolute heaven. We SO need the moisture.

Linking up with Alycia Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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