From the Vault - House Quilt (Summer Blocks)

"From the Vault" is a series in which I show older quilts I've made.  The House Quilt was made in 2003 and has four rows - one for each season.  That wasn't the intention when I started, but I made so many house blocks that I had to organize them somehow.  We've already looked at the winter blocks and the spring blocks.  Today we'll look at the summer row.

Going from left to right, the swirly black print is the outer border, and the fish in the lake is the first block.   I quilted fish shapes in the water.

Camping in a tent.  There's a "Gone Fishin'" button stuck in the ground in front of the tent entrance.  Two canoe buttons float on the lake.

Kind of a weird, me-not-getting-it-right flying geese block for the pine tree.

Summer means the barn doors are open.  Button cows walk out the door; chicken buttons roost in the open cavities above.

Barns draw insects, and they're flocking around this tree next to the barn.

Fourth of July sky with loop-de-loop quilting.  Large feathers flank the sliding doors, for no logical reason.

This is the bird house.  Maybe that's why the feathers are next door - they flew the coop.  Three bird buttons (purple, pink, green) sit on the house, and quilted birds fly by.  

Outer border on the right means this is the end of the row.

Three seasons, one to go.

Hearty Peace Pillow

On the lookout for more ways to use up my fabric, I thought I'd make a pillow for a friend of mine.  She and I are big fans of peace signs, and she liked the fabric I used on this lampshade.  I had leftover fabric, as well as all those pillow forms (aka furry pillows on clearance) that I showed you last Monday.

I call this the front, because it has a border.  It has a border because the heart fabric remnant I was working with wasn't wide enough.

This is the back, and the fabric that was used as a border on the front.

This is a coordinating pillow that I bought earlier this year from Target.

 

This is the flip side of the Target pillow.  So you can see it wasn't an original thought of mine to have peace signs on one side and hearts on the other.  But when you see a good idea, you have to go with it.

Monday is Fun Day - Toy Toaster

I don't know what to say about this, except I bought it at an antique store a few years ago, and I love it as much today as the day I bought it.  The base is plastic, but everything else is metal.  I think it's from the early 1960s.  

Three Shawls

Last week I finished three shawls which I'll be giving to a memory care unit of a local nursing home.  I recently made four lap quilts for them. The way I came up with four of one shape and three of the other is because I wanted to back them all with fleece, and that was what was in my fleece stash, which is all gone now.

This one's my favorite.  I cut rectangles 5" x 10", then sewed them in columns, then staggered the columns so I wouldn't have to feel bad if my corners didn't match up.

The back.  I pieced a yellow strip down the middle, because I didn't have enough of the pink.  Like all of the shawls and lap quilts, the fleece was the starting point for the fabric choices on the front.

The back of this is a muted, marbled blue.

So the front has muted colors, as well.  For this one, I made blocks of three rectangles: stacked small and medium ones, with a side border of a skinny one.  Then I spent approximately 90 minutes arranging the blocks before I sewed them together.  I don't think that was time well spent.

No such problem with this shawl - one great big piece of Philip Jacobs' Delphinium.

The back - more piecing to use up every last scrap of fleece.

It's nice to have all my fleece gone, and to have made a dent in my cotton stash, as well.  It's almost as much fun to use it up as it is to buy more (but not quite).  

New projects coming up: a pillow and another chair cover, this one for my sewing room.  You should be able to see them next week.

A Place for My Lists

Are you a list maker?  If your lists get too long, do you break them into smaller lists by categories?  Do you keep lists in more than one room? I do all of that, and lately I've felt the need to organize my lists.  I wasn't sure what method to use, though.  I've tried chalkboards, but the colored chalk is too scratchy and the colors are too wimpy.  I tried white boards, but the markers were too stinky.  So I decided to go with paper.

I came up with something I think will be just right, and if it doesn't work out, it was a small investment.  I bought a piece of BRIGHT poster board and a roll of ribbon.  And then I found a pen that went with them, and thought "what the heck", so I got that, too.  Total price for everything: $5.15.

I glued the ribbon around the edges of the poster board, then went on a hunt for buttons.  I needed them to cover up the holes in the top where I tied on a narrow ribbon so I could hang this guy on the wall.  

This was the orange collection I bought from Jo-Ann Fabrics during their button sale earlier this month.  Orange is nice, but I have enough orange in the poster board.

The purples looked OK, but nothing special.

Nothing in this lot seemed to work, either.

After sorting through hundreds of buttons, I settled on these silver ones.  They pick up the sliver in the pen and give a mini-respite to all the saturated color.

Here's the finished product.  The poster board wasn't strong enough to hang flat against the wall once I attached the hanging ribbon, so I taped a long piece of foam core to the upper back to act as a brace.

All of the papers (except the white one) have a self-adhesive back, so it's easy to swap them in and out.  Now I need to go fill in all those lists...

Tea for Tuesday - Carrot Teapot

I cut way back on my teapot buying, but I did buy one earlier this year.  I like ceramics that look like things - food, houses, animals.

So when I saw this carrot teapot at a thrift store, I bought it.  It turned out to be educational, because I learned a few new things about carrots this year...

Up until around 100 years ago, most carrots were red or purple or yellow.  If I ever see any of them, I'm going to buy them.  I would imagine they're not as robust or prolific of a grower as the orange ones, and that's why you don't see them nowadays.

The other thing I learned is that the amount of red in a House Finch's plumage is determined by the quantity of carotenoids in its diet.

Monday is Fun Day - Pillow (Forms?)

Pillows are just plain fun.  And expensive.  Pillow forms are pricey enough, too.

So when I found these pillows on clearance for $2 each, I thought "pillow forms!".

The dog found them and thought "toys!".  He would pull them off the couch when nobody was looking and start chewing on them.

So I moved them to another room where they look pretty good and he leaves them alone.  I haven't made any move yet to cover them.  I'm not sure if it's because I'm lazy, or because I'm rather pleased with the garish display.  More likely it's the latter.