2022 Finishes

 I got a very slow start this year as I was dragging my feet on working on the memory quilt for Olivia. I went looking through my quilt album on Facebook and realized I had not been placing everything where it should be! A few moves and some looking through the blog to find those finished quilts that were missing.  Let's take a look and see how I did, shall we?

Hand pieced Hexagon Quilt as you go front. 60x80.

The back of the Hexagon Quilt.

Olivia's memory quilt. Queen size.

Scrappy Crumb quilt.

Sweet Confetti (2021 RSC blocks I think)

Crossed Canoe 2022 RSC blocks... finished the same year and everything!!!

Row House Sew along with Accuquilt.

Endless Diamond. Hand pieced and Hand quilted.

RSC Squares from 2021. This one lives up in Vermont now.

Scrappy Irish Chain was a leader and ender of 2 inch squares years ago. Bear has claimed this quilt. Well, all quilts really!

I dissected an attempted tumbler flag into these two runners.

A baby quilt from a sew along years ago.

Baby Masala that still needs to get shipped off to my great niece. (bad auntie!)

A snowman from the table scrap challenge. 

The Ravelry UFO Challenge has been a big help in getting some old UFO's finished off. I am itching to start some new things in 2023 or grab some kits I have that have been hanging around. 

I liked the idea of doing one Hexagon a day in 2021 and would like to do something one a day in 2023 but have yet to decide on anything. Maybe monthly and change things up a bit? I have been paging through quilt books and magazines and there are plenty of quilts I would love to make. Paring things down is the problem. 

** Edited and linking up with the RSC since quite a few of these finishes are rainbow challenge quilts.

October OMG Finish - Crossed Canoe.

 

My goal this month was to finish the last few blocks and get it assembled, quilted and bound. I'm happy to report that this 36x54 quilt is completed! I'll link up to the October OMG Finish post when the link opens.

This is #14 on my Fall 2022 UFO list. Crossed off and onto the next UFO.

Slow Stitching Sunday

 It was a nice and relaxing day Saturday with no running for me! I did not even get near my car for once and it was oh so nice. Greg took Emily to horses, so I got to relax and play in the sewing room, then watched the F1 practice and qualifying with Aidan.

I have not made much progress on hand quilting the bear paw but hopefully it will move along this week a bit each night.

I have been working on hand stitching the binding on the Crossed Canoe and should get this finished up later today during the race.

I got the Row House sew along runner at Accuquilt completed yesterday. I pulled all from the stash - a Kansas Trouble line, then a brown print for the ground and a mottle sage I had for the border. I 'might' hand quilt this rather than machine quilt it. We will see. I need to pull a backing and batting for it and trim it up a bit and then I'll decided. It might just want to get finished. 

Linking up with the Slow Sunday Stitchers. 

 

As promised here are the sad looking girls who are in various processes of their yearly molting. They tend to molt in the fall and their feathers fall out so new ones come in. They tend to not lay eggs while they are molting, and their crowns change from a bright red to a dull red. Once they change back to bright red, they will be laying eggs again. 

These are the 5 girls. All the reds have passed on, which is a bummer as they were great layers being part Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White mix.

The 3 Barred Rock or Plymouth Rock's are the black and white ones. Myrtle, Maple and DC - Daisy Chickalotta. The top brown with a beard is Poppy an Americana and she lay's my pretty green eggs. Rosie is also an Americana, and she lays small white eggs. From what I can tell, she is not molting as she has all her feathers. One of the Rocks is mostly through her molt as she has all her tail feathers back - I think that is Myrtle. She doesn't have a bright crown yet though so no eggs.

You can see the fluff feathers on Poppy, those will fall off and her tail feathers have mostly fallen out. 

A better shot with just 1 tail feather for Poppy and DC has bald spots on her back end and is missing tail feathers.... but the one on the left has her tail feathers all grown in.

I mentioned Emily made some Molt muffins for the chickens. It is a high protein snack that helps them to grow those new feathers but must be given in moderation. They get 1-2 muffins to split between them each day. She made 2 pans (24) muffins so it should last us through the molt. 

I promised Chicken Tikka Masala for the boy for dinner tonight, so I need to grab the chicken and prep it with the yogurt and spices for marinating in the fridge today.  Have a great Sunday.

RSC Saturday

 I am thankful I have one more weekend of light and bright green! I still need to make my 2 Garden Path blocks and hope to work on them this weekend. 

I did get the Crossed Canoe's quilted last weekend and just need to hand stitch the binding down. It has been a crazy week and no stitching happened in the evenings at all! I should be able to get this finished up today while watching the F1 practice and qualifying with my son.

I finished up the star points for my 16 patch blocks and love how it came out. Now to grab one of each 16 patch color from the pile to make their matching star points. This is now a 16 inch block. 

Linking up with the RSC Challenge.

It was a chilly 43 outside when the dog whining got me up around 8. Turns out Emily was already up with him, silly dog. It will warm up quickly and get up to 80 degrees. I have enjoyed the cooler weather and wearing jeans and even a sweater and coat for morning walks with the dog for the last few days. The animals have all loved the cooler weather and have lots of energy - the dog, the cats, even the chickens! We did have an incident this week where the chicken gate was not latched quick enough and the dog got in..... he just wanted to play but the chickens were not happy. My Poppy (lays my pretty green eggs) was in his mouth for a while but other than being terrified, she has escaped mostly unharmed but did lose a few feathers.  I'll post some photo's of the chickens tomorrow. 

Slow Sunday .....

I sure do hope today is a lot slower than yesterday! I felt like I was running in the car all day long. At least there were lots of animal petting involved in my travels. Today, Greg took Emily to school to feed the chapter animals. I took her yesterday afternoon. They don't have the heifer that she will show yet, but they picked up the chapter pig Friday and have the chapter lamb already. The school is housing a few other animals for the kids, but they are responsible for caring for them, so she just had to feed, water and exercise the lamb and the black pig. 

This one was so darn cute.... for a goat!

Chapter pig - so she cleaned his stall and fed him. There is an auto waterer for them.

Exercising Stetson the lamb.

The goat and lamb enclosure.

We started off the morning with a lot of time at the barn. Lots of staff was at Nationals in Oklahoma so there was just 2 staff juggling everything with a couple of call outs. Having to wait an extra 30 minutes on the lesson meant they got extra riding time in the arena! This is Mack - or Marshmallow is his barn name. It appears he really only likes Emily riding him =). She got lots of walking, trotting and a few canters in. 

After finishing up the animal duties at school I dropped Emily to a friend's house for an evening of movie watching. That let me finally get into the sewing room where this fellow thought he needed attention. Yes, I managed to quilt that last quarter of this crossed canoe with Peanut on it behind the sewing machine! I relented and didn't move him to get it trimmed and make and attach the binding last night. I'll do that this morning. It is 36x54.

I hope to be adding some binding stitches to this later tonight. We will see if it is after a pick up at Grandma's or not. Emily is staying home as she might meet up with a friend who is up from Miami this weekend. The boy was sneezing and blowing all day yesterday so we will see if he is up to visiting Grandma today. He thinks it is allergies. I have yet to hear him.... we was in his room sneezing and blowing his nose by this time yesterday so maybe he got some sleep?

A little progress was made on the Bear Paw this week. I am debating on how to quilt the inner paw - 3 straight lines or a rounded paw pad? Until I decide I'll continue outlining the outer paw triangles and the inner sashing areas. 

Linking up with Kathy and the other Slow Stitchers.

RSC in bright green

It is going to be a long day! My son follows F1 racing, and they are in Japan this weekend. That makes for very early watching! I was up late (for me!) and watched the Practice 3 from 11PM-midnight with Aidan. He did stay up to watch the Qualifying from 2-3AM and slept until 11AM. The race is Sunday morning 1-3 AM our time. I hope to stay awake and watch it live. I watched qualifying when I got up this morning!

The dog decided I needed to get up a bit after 7AM to be fed but I had him get up my hubby to walk him. He let the girl sleep in! Silly dog. She got home a bit before 11PM after playing in the pep band at the high school football game. 

This morning was horses and she tried jumping again today. Just 2 poles crossed in an X low to the ground. Marshmallow did not want to jump but she got him to go over twice. Then did some trotting and a canter. I managed to not hit the record button so missed her going over both times, but I did get to see it!

Peanut got some attention while I was in the sewing room this afternoon. I stitched up one of my 16 patch blocks in bright greens.

I stitched together the Crossed Canoe blocks and thank goodness I took a picture of the blocks laid out on the floor. I always manage to move things around but lots of checking the photo had me sew this one together how I planned. It is currently 36x54 and I think I want to add a little border to get it to a 40x60 size (ok, 42x60) for Project Linus. I'll piece the snowflake backing that I have left for this one and just need to figure out what color to use as a border. Any ideas? I think I know how I will walking foot quilt this one as well, outlining the middle canoe parts so it looks like a gentle curve. 

Linking up with the RSC Challenge.

RSC Saturday

What a week! We were spared any issues from Hurricane Ian but so many people in the state of Florida were devastated and their households and businesses are gone. There are still issues with flooding in the south and central Florida and the clean up and rebuilding of lives will take a long time. 

Some cooler weather moved in after the storm and we enjoyed breezy temps in the mid 60's all day Thursday. The kids loved being out in the back yard with those temps. See - I do have 2 kids and they were out taking turns chasing the dog to get some of his energy out.

Today, the below normal temps again reined, and she had a pleasant upper 70's to ride in.

While she was out giving Bear the dog a bath with her Dad, I stole into the sewing room with Peanut the cat and picked some fabrics to finish off the Crossed Canoe blocks. I picked 2 bright greens and a deep purple to give me 25 blocks. I messed up on the pink and yellow months and cut too many parts out so had some extra blocks from the 20 I had planned. I am going to go with a 5x5 setting and will have the kids play with the color layout and move the blocks around a bit before stitching them together.  Now I'm wondering if they need sashing and cornerstone blocks? Hmmmmmm.

I need to pop out and get some fiberfill so I can finally finish my light blue pumpkin for the table scrap challenge.  

Linking up with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

OMG for October

 After assembling the Fall UFO list in the last post, I decided that this month will be tackling the Crossed Canoe quilt blocks. I need to make 2 more in bright green. I made a mistake cutting extra yellow and pink on those months, but I think I'm just going to include them in the quilt and make it a little bigger. I'll move things around once I get the final 2 blocks made.

 This month, I plan to finish the last 2 (or 3? maybe 5x5 instead of 4x6?) blocks, piece it into a top and get it quilted and bound. 

Linking up with Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal for October.

RSC in light blue

 Looking at my list of things to add this month - it looks like crossed canoe and 16 patch blocks are all that is needed. I have light blue garden path blocks already from last year.

That got me to thinking of which collection should I attempt to get to a top stage this month. I am going to work on getting the Sweet Confetti blocks stitched together I think. These are from the book - Sunday Best Quilts. 96 blocks are made and ready to be stitched.

Linking up with the RSC Quilters.

Crossed Canoe

 I just took a little sewing time and got my 2 orange Crossed Canoe blocks completed and added to the mix. I believe we have 2 more colors to add for a 4x5 setting. Linking up with the RSC.

RSC Crossed Canoe blocks

I cut 2 purple crossed canoe blocks and got them stitched up this week and added to the collection. We had red in January, teal in February, Yellow in March, Pink in April, Dark green in May, Dark Blue in June and now Purple in July. 

I use my Accuquilt and my Crossed Canoe Die to make these. I cut 2 6.25 inch squares of background and the color to make each block. Swap out the middle of each and you get 2 blocks of each to make my block.

First I put the middle and corner triangle together.

Then add a side. The extra bits are cut off so everything lines up really nicely.

Add the other side and you get one part of the block.

With 4 parts together you get a Crossed Canoe block. These are really easy to put together. 

Linking up with the RSC on Saturday.

 

Monday

 With the girl dropped off to girl scout camp yesterday afternoon, I have pledged to spend an hour a day in the sewing room to see if I can make some progress in there this month. After work, I headed into the sewing room and got to work. 

I have to say... it turned into more than an hour, but I made great progress today! I cut out the green and dark blue ones today with the Accuquilt cutter and sewed them up. All caught up with the RSC challenge this year. I had cut out some extra yellow and pink ones... and have 2 of the pink ones together and part of one of the yellow ones. I need to cut a few more white parts out so I can finish the other extra yellow ones. I'll link up Saturday with the RSC.

I got to bring Aidan to guitar tonight so I had 30 minutes to do a little crochet on a medium blue granny square. It would have been done if I had not made a mistake and had to pull out 2 rounds. Oh well, it will crochet up quickly. 

RSC in pink

 I finally cut out the crossed canoes for pink and yellow (oops, forgot to do them last month!) and I managed to cut out enough for 4 blocks for each instead of 2. Oh well, it never hurts to have some extra's. I managed to sew 3 of them together before the bobbin ran out. We won't mention that I managed to sew 2 of them together wrong and got the trusty seam ripper out for some usage before I sewed them together correctly, all under the watchful eye of Peanut the cat who draped himself over the sewing machine. Some stitching did happen while holding his tail out of the way of the needle. 

Linking up on Saturday to the RSC.