Quilting the day away

I can always tell when a non-quilter walks into my house; they never say boo about the various finished and unfinished tops and quilts I have draped over my quilt rack or my stairwell.  They never question why there are so many safety pins in that quilt (assuming it's part of the decor, I guess).

A quilter, on the other hand, would say "are you going to put a border on that" or "wow, that top you've been working on forever is looking good".

So on Worldwide Quilting Day, I'll show you a few things I've been working on.

A present for my friend for her birthday (a little late, but that's OK). Hope this table runner isn't too long for her table! Just needs a binding.

And the back:

A little free-motion quilting on a bigger quilt for my wall:

Then non-quilty related:

My over-wintered begonia is doing fine.

And it's still winter here,

in case you were wondering.

Yellow and Grey, Oh My!

A new secret group baby quilt in the making for a coworker.

A sampling of fabrics used.

Mom and dad don't want to know the baby's gender until it is born, and so mom decided on a yellow and grey color scheme. Of course, I couldn't leave that alone (plain grey and yellow? Boring...to me.)
I threw in some Kaffe prints that have the requisite grey and yellow, plus other fun colors.

I picked out the fabric, with 6 yellows and 6 greys.  Theses yellows and greys will be 6.5-inch blocks surrounded by 2.5 inch strips (grey strips on yellow, yellow strips on grey). I'm hoping it will look sparkly and fun.

We have 6 baby quilt sewers this time, including me, and a quilter (I hope). Not sure who's going to do the binding, now that Nancy has retired.  Everyone (except the vacationing Deb) got their assignments this morning at work.

Will show you some layout fun when I get the blocks back in 3 weeks.

Scrappy Tripping

I have been bitten by the Scrappy Trip Around the World bug! I first saw quilts made with this method on Bonnie Hunter's web site (tutorial here). Lately versions of this quilt are popping up all over quilt blog land.

Bonnie's tutorial has you sew six strips (2.5 inches wide by 16 inches long) together, pressing, sewing them into a tube, and cross-cutting the tube into six 2.5-inch cuts. Then you have to "unsew" a small seam in each crosscut section of the tube to get the above layout (look at the tutorial if I lost you; there's lots of pictures there to help you see the process).

I have a boatload of leftover 2.5-inch strips, cut the full width of fabric, and I didn't really want to cut the strips down to 16 inches, so I decided an experiment was in order. I did the sewing as in the tutorial, using the full 40 inches, then I sub cut twelve 2.5-inch cuts.  If you can see the difference above, I used a different "dark" fabric as the middle diagonal, so that the two blocks would not be identical. I think that is going to work.

Don't worry, there will be lots of variety when I'm done. I'm including various greens in each block as I have a garden theme in mind. But there is no rush to get this project going (and I have others that need to be completed first). I will save this sewing for those days when not a lot of thinking is required.